It is a web-based version of SketchUp and to use it you have to sign up for an account through the official website. This plan is best suited for personal use. If you are looking for a SketchUp program for a company, for example, this may not be the best option. Besides, since it is a web-based application, you can only use its features while online and thus requires a very good internet connection.
To choose the best SketchUp plan, you have to understand what you can do and what you cannot do using the plan so that you can gauge if your design needs will be taken care of. If you sign up for a SketchUp Free account and log into your account, you will have the following at your disposal to use:.
In SketchUp Free Plan, you will be able to use all the above applications for free except Sefaira, used for early-stage analysis by designers who care about building performance, which you will require to buy. This is where you do all your 3D modelling when using the SketchUp Fee plan.
If you have an existing design that you want to open and do edits on, you should click on open and then select the project from your cloud storage. If the design is in your computer, you will have to first upload it into the cloud storage to access it through SketchUp Free. If you choose to create a new design, you will be required to choose a template with the measurements feet and inches, millimetres, or meters that you are comfortable with. Once you select that, you will be taken to the designing and modelling platform where you can start drawing, designing and modelling whatever you want.
This provides you with a selection of already designed SketchUp models of various things like chairs, bathtubs, kitchen sinks, etc. These come in handy when you are working on your design in the SketchUp for Web.
It saves you the time of having to design and draw some of these common appliances. To use any of the design models, you click on it and download it and then open it in the SketchUp for Web. The available models in SketchUp Free plan are however limited.
This provides you with some extensions for customizing your 3D models. You can use this section to perform some tasks like extraction, welding joints, bending, etc. After doing all your work using SketchUp, you use SketchUp Viewer to share your work with your colleagues and partners so that they can also view the model.
To use the SketchUp viewer, however, you will have to download it into your computer or mobile phone. This is the platform where you can learn SketchUp , interact with fellow designers and also contribute to threads. If you purchase the SketchUp Pro plan, you will be at liberty to use it on the web or download it onto your computer. Contrary to SketchUp Free which has limited features, SketchUp Pro is a full-featured web and desktop modeller and can be used to create anything.
Professional interoperability that allows it to support a wide range of Import and Export File Types. This plan is best for professionals as well as students in Primary and secondary schools. It can be downloaded onto desktops while offline. The SketchUp Pro plan comes with most of the fancy advanced tools required for 3D modelling and design presentations required by professionals and students.
The SketchUp Pro desktop platform provides you with all the tools you require to do a professional 3D model. Additionally, pressing shift can now lock the proportions of a square or golden section. Rotated Rectangle tool plane locking improvement: The Rotated Rectangle tool now respects a locked plane across all steps for the tool. If you chose a surface to lock the tool to at the beginning, this orientation will persist throughout creating your rectangle. Perpendicular to Face inference: We added the ability to hover over any surface and then find an inference for the direction perpendicular to the face.
Note it is not possible to force this inference using the down arrow key but it can be locked once it appears by holding shift. This inference shows up whether there is geometry on the origin or not and has higher priority over other inferences.
It shows up automatically when you hover over a selected component or group with a drawing tool. Persistent IDs for entities have been added to SketchUp This feature is useful to developers and allows us to improve interoperability between LayOut and other products.
A unique, persistent ID number is now internally assigned to geometry when it is added to a model. This includes unique IDs for edges, vertices, faces, and more that will be maintained even if the geometry is moved, rotated, or scaled.
It is now possible to customize SketchUp's red, green, blue, magenta, and cyan inference colors. If you change these settings, you may notice that the axis colors will get brighter to match your selected direction colors exactly.
In SketchUp and earlier versions, the axis colors were slightly muted relative to the inference colors. Also note that if you adjust your colors, SketchUp will continue to refer to red, green, and blue axis directions in tool tips, the status bar and the Instructor.
Inference Icons end-points, mid-points, on edge, etc Use this style as a base for dialing in your custom colors and shades. It is intended to help maximize people's ability to see when inferences appear. Since there are many different types of colorblindness, you may need to edit this style to best fit with the colors that work for you.
Once you are done, don't forget to set up a template with your new style. When you launch SketchUp, we are now much smarter about choosing the ideal graphics card settings i. Previously, we sometimes selected settings that didn't allow models to display as well as they could have and which had a negative impact on performance.
Note though that we have chosen the setting that we think is ideal for your graphics card and that if you choose too high of a setting, performance and possibly stability may be affected. We have standardized where product content, stuff like collections of components, materials and styles are stored on the file system. And on both Windows and Mac, we created Components, Materials, Styles and Templates folders for your user related content.
By default, these folders are in the following locations:. Note that if you store your content in these folders, it will show up in the Components, Materials and Styles browsers without you having to do anything and your templates will show up on the Templates pane as well. Additionally, users no longer require special privileges in order to modify the contents of these folders. We now present the create component dialog when converting a group to a component.
This allows users to set the full range of component attributes when converting instead of having to go back and edit the resulting component in Entity Info or the Components dialog. This workflow helps a great deal when using the Solid Tools on components. The Solid Tools still create groups but it's quick to use the create component option to redefine your desired component definitions.
Updates and new features include:. Create a table: For LO we have added the much requested and necessary Table tool. You can now create a multiple row and column table that is easily customized to fit your needs. So, if you need to create a schedule, cutlist or legend look no further than the new Table tool. You can further customize your table by editing the Shape Style settings for lines and cell fills. These styles can be applied to other tables with the Styles Tool.
You can now import. Spreadsheets imported to LayOut are dynamically referenced just like SketchUp models and image files. If your linked file changes, you can update the reference to display the new data or re-link to an updated spreadsheet. From XSLX files, you can import any sheet you like and also formatting you've already dialed in. An intentional bonus: it's now pretty easy to create beautiful tables from the data in your SketchUp model.
Use Generate Report or an extension like Cutlist to generate a. If your tables typically use a certain style, you can save a styled table in a scrapbook. When you're ready to create a new table, bring in your sample from the scrapbook.
You can then enter data in LayOut or insert data into the table from an external file. When inserting. As stated in the SketchUp portion, Persistent IDs will benefit LayOut by providing a unique, persistent ID to keep dimensions and labels attached to the desired geometry even when the model changes. When an existing file that had been labeled and dimensioned prior to our implementation of PID's is opened, LayOut will attempt to connect to the object directly below.
These disconnects will be shown with a non printable red box around the text. Now you can drag the dimension line without affecting the dimension's offsets or connections. The long awaited and often requested feature is now in your hands. Offset away on lines, arcs, rectangles, circles, polygons and objects with boundaries. LayOut objects will be contained in paperspace while non-perspective SketchUp objects will be placed in a scaled modelspace viewport.
Perspective views will be hidden line drawings contained in the paperspace.
