SketchUp Pro 2018 is here. Deliver work you’re incredibly proud of!
Here’s what’s new in 2018…
Smarter Sections:
Section Planes are essential to architectural composition, so there are some big improvements.
Named Sections – Just like components, section planes have names and symbols, making them easy to find, organise, and edit in Outliner. Now, it’s easy to access and manage sections whenever you need to.
Filled Section Cuts – Filled Section Cuts are now baked into SketchUp Pro. Select a colour for your fills via the Styles dialogue and bake them into templates.
Fast Sections – SketchUp features improved performance for models that use section planes to hide large amounts of geometry. The more geometry you section off, the more you’ll benefit!
Make Better Drawings
Scaled Vector Drawing – Need to add linework that’s not in your model? Create a scaled drawing in LayOut and sketch over a 3D model to flesh out your project. Or draw from details to scale from scratch directly in LayOut
DWG Import – Import a DWG into LayOut and find illustrations already scaled to paper size. Now SketchUp projects can live side by side with CAD linework and take advantage of DWG libraries everywhere. LayOut A+: plays well with others.
Drawing Better – Inferencing, chamfering and filleting, arcs, offset arrays, selections: LayOut is even better at everything you need to draw details or create beautiful illustrations at scale.
Got BIM?
Ultimately, ‘BIM’ is about using information in your model to make better buildings. The focus is to help users embed and manage information in a SketchUppy way.
Advanced Attributes – SketchUp now features Advanced Attribute fields for a component’s Price, Size, URL, Type, Status, and Owner. So now it’s even easier to embed projects with useful information.
Aggregated Reports – Generate Report now aggregates component data so you can do things like configure reports to sum parts and quantities for schedules and cutlists, or create detailed estimates by adding up prices by layer. It’s time to crunch model data!
IFC Import/Export – BIM works best when information moves freely between applications. You can rely on IFC in SketchUp to transfer the attributes you assign and manipulate in project.
There’s more…
Outliner – While adding support for Section Planes, SketchUp have improved Outliner’s overall load performance and sort order so that your component names load in alphabetical and numerical order.
Drawing Improvement – Draw a rectangle about its center using modifier keys. Use simplified inferencing options for line and arc drawing. Employ quicker control for rotated rectangles. Small, smart changes that help you draw exactly what you want.
STL Import/Export – The SketchUp STL extension is by far the most popular download from Extension Warehouse. Going forward it might not be, because now SketchUp natively supports the import and export of STL files (on both desktop and web).
Preferences Refactor – Improved SketchUp and LayOut preferences so that they are organized and migrated the same way between version upgrades. It should be easy to use the latest, greatest versions of our software!
Mac Improvements – For Mac users, anti-alias settings have been added. Go to SketchUp > Preferences > OpenGL to control the pixel blending, which is the resolution of smoothness in your geometry.
SAAW Line – SAAW (Stippled Anti-Aliased Wide) Lines are an entirely new way that SketchUp renders lines (e.g., edges, axes, guides, text/dimension leader lines, rubber band lines as you draw, component bounding boxes, section plane borders/cuts… ) Sounds pretty fundamental to SketchUp, right? It is, and the good news is that you should barely notice it. This type of line rendering is supported by WebGL and required by OpenGL 3.0, as well as the technologies we expect to use for years to come. We won’t be talking to our users much about this directly, but it’s good for the inner circle to understand more about how drawing works!
LayOut
Better LayOut, Much Better Drawings
LayOut is where people harvest their 3D work in SketchUp to produce excellent drawings. The SketchUp commitment for LayOut is to help professionals make much better drawings, much quicker, and with as much control as they need.
Scaled Vector Drawing – Now you can use LayOut’s vector illustration tools to draft in 2D at scale. Use your SketchUp model as a base for accurately scaled construction details, or just sketch a detail from scratch in LayOut (which is what a lot of LayOut users want to do). Re-set scales as you wish and your work will resize as necessary. As you would expect, your scaled illustrations are fully supported by LayOut’s Dimension and Label tools.
DWG Imports – One reason that drawing in 2D at scale is important is that a lot of LayOut users are trying to work with imported AutoCAD geometry via the DWG format. So in this release, we’re introducing LayOut’s ability to import DWG files. DWG projects import at scale and support the pages, title blocks, and blocks. Even better, LayOut users can now help themselves to the vast world of free DWG libraries. And yes, we also improved the quality of DWG files you export from LayOut.
Group Edit – To support scaled drawings, we made a juicy change we think LayOut regulars will notice right away: Editing grouped entities in LayOut now works just like it does in SketchUp. That means it’s way easier to draw and manipulate grouped entities. LayOut users can also control “rest of document” visibility when editing within a group.
Drawing Tool Improvements
For 2018 there will be a range of improved drawing tools in LayOut. Inferencing, chamfering and filleting, arcs, offset arrays, selections: LayOut will be better at everything you need to draw details or create beautiful illustrations.
Multi Viewport Dimensioning – What sounds like an enabling physics concept for teleportation is actually a pretty simple LayOut idea. Users will be able to draw dimensions across SketchUp viewports in order to create a specific section detail.
Precise Dimensions – LayOut dimensions can now be as precise as SketchUp dimensions. That’s up to 0.000001 inches. Do the math: that means LayOut can show the decimal equivalent of 1/64” (0.015625”).
Advanced Attribute Labels – Like all of the information in your model, SketchUp’s new advanced attributes are easily available when drawing LayOut labels.
Other LayOut Improvements
Entity Locking – Similar to group editing, locking entities is fundamental to how many people organize and navigate projects (both models and documents). Now you can easily lock individual LayOut entities to cut down on accidental selections.
Unicode Font Support – With Unicode font support, LayOut will work much better in languages that don’t use Roman characters.
