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It's been a while since I used SketchUp. I drifted away after Google took it over, but, now that it is part of the Trimble line-up, it has become interesting again, with some new features to play around with. It's still a fun product to use - simple to learn and extremely flexible - but has grown in maturity to become a serious tool for building design with some major development projects being undertaken entirely within its scope.

SketchUp, as I am sure everyone knows, is a highly modifiable 3D modelling tool. Drawn shapes are extruded to create 3D volumes combined with, or extracted from, other volumes, to build up complex structures. What prevents all of this free-form modelling from being an uncontrollable volume floating in 3D space is the core feature of the software, inferencing, the positioning of a figure in a defined space, initiated by that bit of inspired content - the figure standing on the x,y,z axis. This is what orients SketchUp geometry, its tools, and you as the architect, in 3D space.

Inferencing Updates
The latest SketchUp release has added some new functionality to the inferencing engine. Most useful is probably the display of parallel and perpendicular inferences, which can be forced and locked, using the Down Arrow key. The Shift key can also be used as an inference lock where you may want to use a SketchUp tool, including parallel and perpendicular. The number of tools that can be used with Arrow key locking has been increased, used to toggle on or off an axis lock.

Drawing facilities in 3D are enhanced with smart centre-pointing for circles and arcs: useful changes that may quickly become part of how you draw in 3D. Enhancing inferencing logic has also greatly expanded the options that are available within tools such as Circle and Rotate.

The benefit of all this enhanced logic is that you don't have to create as much reference or construction geometry as you previously had to - things like using guides or edges to position the centre of protractors for the rotate tool. But with SketchUp 2016 you merely have to lock the protractor orientation to a surface orientation with the Down Arrow key, then find the intersection of two edges for placing the protractor centre.

Forget Inferencing
While the inferencing improvements are great, they don't necessarily change the way you are used to modelling in SketchUp. They're handy, but not intrusive. For instance, as even SketchUp, itself claims, “You can draw edges and faces without all the ins and outs of inferencing. You can create geometry without creating groups.”

You can also make copies, but not components, and set styles without having to get involved in unnecessary style configurations. Likewise, it's possible to export images without using LayOut. In fact, you can use SketchUp the way you want, without getting lost in the weeds (its terminology, again!).

Working with Components
Why use Components and LayOut, then? Components can speed up model creation, if you need to insert numerous instances of a single object - windows, for instance. Transforming geometry into a component, either within the model you are working on or in a separate SketchUp file, endows it with behaviours and capabilities, and separates it from any geometry to which it is connected. Components are therefore reusable and can be edited within the model or within its definition file. You can also add metadata to a component, such as IFC classification types.

LayOut
Something I never had in the last SketchUp version I owned (a much older one) before I downloaded SketchUp Pro 2016 is the LayOut, which enables users to lay out elevations, highlight details and set up title blocks, and to insert SketchUp model views alongside them, creating Viewports linked to the model. When a model changes, all viewports are updated too.

As well as managing the creation of drawing sheets with multiple layers, LayOut helps to eliminate some ambiguities that could occur in laying models out. Amongst the organisation improvements made by SketchUp to LayOut are multi-layer groups, where entities on different layers can be grouped together, instead of (as earlier) collapsing grouped entities on different layers into one single layer.

Another significant enhancement is the introduction of new tool colours, and highlights helps you notice when you're creating or selecting entities on a shared layer. The benefits of all this are easier cutting and pasting across pages, the organisation of groups of entities and the ability to keep track of where things are.

SketchUp has also introduced a new API, so that designers can now create and customise layout files from SketchUp models. Likewise, LayOut's reference objects have become web friendly, enabling projects to reference and update files stored and synced with services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Trimble Connect Sync.

Sticking with LayOut, the dimension system has been improved to handle smaller dimensions. Dimensions in small spaces tended to get squeezed by arrows and extension lines. Now, when dimension text is deemed to be too big for the space available, LayOut shifts the text out to the side with a leader line that you can customise it at will. (Actually, you can already create dimension chains using a double-click technique).

Utility Dialogues
Tidying up the appearance of the screen layout appears to have been another focus of SketchUp 2016. You can now use the utility dialogues on Windows machines to pull supplemental menus, such as Styles, Materials and Outliner, into customisable, collapsible trays - while still retaining their ability to float, if you want them to. Dialogues that you might want to group together can be grouped into trays. Designating a custom 'Model Organisation' tray, for instance, for Entity Info, Layers and Scenes, which is useful for calling up and hiding go-to utilities, and readily accessible when not actually in use.

The work done by SketchUp in developing LayOut had a spin-off: the foundation for a new C API which will open a new chapter of extensibility for LayOut, enabling SketchUp users to share their add-ons and their custom enhancements with the whole SketchUp community, which is already well-served with the wealth of contributions found in SketchUp's 3D Warehouse.

SketchUp Collaboration From humble beginnings as a concept design tool to becoming an important building design application, SketchUp is no longer the province of the lone architect, and model development is now very much a shared process. To facilitate this, SketchUp has continued to make the software work better with people, information and tools, both inside and outside of the SketchUp environment.

When you export information from a .skp, users now have more control of what data is included and how it's organised. To facilitate this, the generate report tool lets users pick just those attributes they would like in takeoffs and estimates. The custom reports generated can be saved as templates and used with other projects.

Trimble Connect
Last year, thanks to its new ownership, SketchUp was also able to announce the availability of Trimble Connect, a new way to collaborate on projects to store, sync, reference, share and collaborate on design/build projects, using a number of different file formats, such as .skp, .pdf, .dxf, .ifc… whichever you prefer to work with.

Now Trimble Connect is available to all SketchUp Pro users, who can sign up for a free account that will enable them to start publishing to shared project folders, import reference models from Connect into projects and publish updated models directly from SketchUp.

SketchUp files can then be managed directly from a browser: it's a useful tool that allows users to compare versions, annotate models, create to-dos and a whole lot more.
www.sketchup.com