Hey, guys.
I'm Aaron, and I want to take a look at my five favorite things in SketchUp 2024.
So right now,
as of this recording, it's the beginning of April 2024,
and the new version of SketchUp for desktop just dropped.
What I want to do real quick is just hop in there and show you guys
what are my five favorite things in the new version.
Let's take a look.
Okay, so first things first.
This is the good stuff. This is the good looking stuff.
We have some new view types,
some new Styles that include Ambient Occlusion.
I like the look of Ambient Occlusion.
The gentle shadowing, the way
it emphasizes where materials butt up against each other.
This isn’t ambient occlusion.
This is just a regular old SketchUp view— default Style.
It's actually called Default Style, but I have right here,
I do have a Scene shared with Ambient Occlusion.
So you look at that and you can see this...
[happy sounds] ...I love me some Ambient Occlusion.
It just gives me some depth, it gives me some shadow, it gives me some hint of where geometry is.
You can see these shadows that show up, just toggle back and forth.
If I go back to standard,
it's, I mean, this green chair’s all green.
I have a wood material on here and they're just all wood the same.
Where as if I toggle on the Ambient Occlusion, you can see you get those shadows,
you get that depth, you get that, that look of overlapping materials.
So cool. There's a bunch of these Ambient Occlusion
types.
I have a group here, in 2024 Ambient Occlusion Style types.
And I have a bunch in here, and I have the ability to come in
and change the Ambient Occlusion values.
I mean, there it is.
It's one of the things where, you know, the image speaks for itself. You get to see it.
It's awesome.
It's in here. It's part of 2024.
Better looking models by far.
It does get away from, you know, that classic SketchUp look, where
I just had these kind of flat materials and lines. Which is still available.
I could still make files look this way all the time.
But if I want to, I can add that depth.
Add those shadows go a little bit deeper.
And again, this isn't like a rendering or anything.
This is actually my SketchUp model so I can move around in it.
Those shadows, those Ambient Occlusion
shadows and tones stay in the model as I move in 3D space.
All right.
Second thing I want to point out is the integration with Trimble Connect.
So Trimble Connect has been part of SketchUp for a while, but the level of integration with
this is the newest version of SketchUp for desktop goes beyond what it was before.
So a couple of things up in the upper right corner.
I have my my, I'm logged in icon, but also see this little page right here?
This tells me—since I see a page—that this has been saved locally.
I know it's been saved because there's a page here.
If I hover over it will even tell me when it was saved.
If I come up to File and I go to Trimble Connect
and I'm just going to save to Trimble Connect real quick.
Yeah, I'm just going to put
this into my let's see, where is it?
I think I have a “My SketchUp Models.” There we go.
Let's go to my SketchUp models and I will just save it
Once I've done that, watch what happens up here— I get this little cloud icon.
That cloud indicates that—well right now, the little blue thing indicates it is currently
saving—once it’s just a cloud up there that tells me that it's been saved up to Trimble Connect.
It even tells me what version, how often have I saved it?
At this point I just saved it once. So it's on version 1.
Once this is saved up to the cloud,
I can click on the second icon, and the second icon is share a link
right here.
So with this I can say Create a shareable link.
And what this will do is it will generate a link and I can take this link
now and I can pass this to somebody else.
They can click on that link, and this model that I'm looking at right here
will open up in SketchUp for web.
So they'll actually have a viewable—it's not editable—it is just a viewable version
of this entire model showing up right in SketchUp for web.
And all I got to do is hit Copy and paste it in a text, email,
write it down on a Post It.
That would be painful, but you could do it.
I mean, it can happen. But this link will take them to that viewable
version of this exact model that is shared on Trimble Connect.
All right, let's keep moving.
Those are two of my favorite things.
Let's look at another one.
I'm going to hop over here to just an empty screen.
This, by the way, is Teddy, the scale figure for 2024.
Everybody say, “Hi, Teddy.” And then, as we do, “Bye, Teddy.” I’m going to get rid of Teddy.
All right.
So I'm going to just create a big building real quick.
We're going to look at some stuff with Add Location.
So I'm just going to draw a couple rectangles like this, pull them up.
I probably should have kept Teddy, so I know what scale those are, but it's an outline of a building.
Now, I'm going to come up here, hit Add Location,
and in Add Location.
First off, you'll see, if you are familiar, if you've used Add Location at all
you'll know, this is a very different look than I've seen before.
A couple of things right here in the screen.
I got some stuff, I’ve got North showing up, I have the option of showing my building on here.
I can actually turn this on and off.
I can see where's my model as it exists fit on the screen,
and then I can actually take this and move it around.
So let's see.
I will put this up here.
Here, I like this open space, we’ll drag it right about here.
And I can put that on there.
I can see where it's going to be.
When I hit Continue,
I can choose, like I did before, I can choose how much I want to import with this.
Do I want to...
let's get a little bit this road over here.
Okay, So I can choose how much I want.
I can tell it do I want to import a 2D plane, it would be a flat image.
Or do I want to bring in a 3D mesh which is actually going to include
how much undulation of the earth is going to be included.
I can choose imagery or street map.
I can choose the density of the mesh.
How many squares are going to be used to make up that rolling geometry.
And I can also choose the resolution of the image: high or low.
And the provider: Bing or Digital Globe.
Depending where you are in the world, you might get better solutions, better results
from one versus another.
And I'm going to go ahead and just I'm going to hit import.
We're not going too deep in this,
I just wanted to give you guys an idea how this works and show you one of my favorite parts of this.
So this works very similar to the way it did before.
When this comes in now, there is my model sitting on the land, as you would expect.
But here's the part.
Here's what's make it makes it my favorite part.
Watch this. Come back into Add Location.
I'm going to add another tile.
Look what it does.
It remembers what I imported last time, and it'll let me grab another piece and watch this.
This is it. This is the cool part. Ready? Snap.
So it's going to snap right up against that other piece.
And if I say Import,
it imports that
right next to that.
Look at that. That's so cool!
And I have control over those as separate pieces.
If I come over here to Tags I have geolocation content, 3D terrain,
and I have both of the imports separate so I can actually toggle them one at a time.
This is what makes it one of my favorite things in this new version
is that ability to import additional context and have control over it separately.
All right. We got to keep moving.
I'm going to bring up and show you something real quick in LayOut.
Okay.
Here we go.
All right.
So in LayOut, I just got a quick model right here.
This is from the previous model I was looking at.
I took a viewport.
I snapped it in half, half vector, half raster.
That's not new. That's all existing stuff.
What is new is over here in Preferences, under Performance, I have this thing called Draft Mode,
so I'm going to turn on Draft Mode and what Draft Mode will do.
Actually, let’s turn Draft Mode off, and I'm just going to pan,
I'm just going to hold down the middle button and move around, see what happens.
Nothing. That's right. Unexciting.
The before is always the dull one, right? It just moves.
As I zoom in here, you can see it's a little jumpy as I'm zooming,
but it's trying to move everything around.
So this is a simpler model. As you get more and more complex models with more and more lines,
I can definitely see some stutter with things like zooming or panning.
But if I enable Draft Mode.
So right now we're going to turn on Pan and Zoom Only as opposed to Always On.
We'll see why in a second.
And I'm just turning it on, I'm not turning on any of the options on below.
But watch what happens when I zoom. Whoa.
Did you see that?
We can look at my vector side
just zooming in and out, drops
everything down to the basic line width.
Right?
I don't get any of that depth.
I don't get any multiple line widths that I have set up,
which just saves some of the demand as it redraws the screen each time.
So every time, if you’re not aware of this, every time I move something on the screen,
LayOut has to go in and redraw it.
And that's what causes LayOut to slow down
is there's too much redrawing and it takes a while so it'll get hung up.
So by doing this this way, by dropping it down,
it has to redraw less, but it doesn’t have to figure out how thick each line is.
That’s without the options on.
The other option I have here is Disable Raster-Rendered Object.
So this means as I pan and zoom raster
stuff disappears, it just goes away.
So I see my viewport.
See that? That rectangle right there.
But what's in it goes away.
Because again, it doesn't have to draw it to the screen.
It's going to be more performant and go faster.
I have another option here to disable viewport drawing altogether, so whether it's a vector or raster.
They just go away as I zoom in and out.
So this is extreme, but if you have a really, really big model,
if you're into it and you have a lot going on and you're seeing, it's hard
to move through the model, you can try flipping this on and turning these on and off.
You don't even have to have this on.
You can turn Draft Mode off all you want, and then this is just going to stay, right?
So they come in here, select a viewport,
move around like it's going to stay the way it was.
But if you are experiencing those problems, this just definitely speeds it up.
The other thing that's in here too, is the graphics engine.
I do have an experimental graphics engine I can toggle on,
which is just going to make better use of how stuff is drawn to the screen.
It's not fine tuned, it’s not the best yet, but it is an improvement over the old one.
So I recommend trying this.
But it's experimental, you know, it's what's in the name.
You're the test pilot, but give it a try. See what you think.
It's got some pretty cool advantages depending on the model you're looking at.
Speaking of performance,
LayOut got some performance increase with the with the Draft Mode
and the experimental engine, but we got some performance increase in SketchUp as well.
So I'm going to go ahead and jump back over to SketchUp
and we're going to take a look at this model right here. And
this model
is, as you can see, a very big model.
And you can see it is not— SketchUp’s not having any problem moving this big model around.
If I did this in 23, it would be chunky,
slow, each—constantly [slow, heavy noises]
showing my screen, and a lot of buildings that are in here
would get reduced to those dotted outlines because there's too much information for it to draw.
This model—just to give you an idea—this model
is 6 million edges, just shy of 3 million faces.
This is a big model.
There's no Components so I don’t have any of those, you know, load
saving techniques that we always recommend: use Components that repeat.
Instead everything is just an individual group.
So nothing is being optimized here and it performs brilliantly.
So I would say check this out with those models that are big.
If I’ve got like smooth geometry, any place I have a whole lot of geometry, the new version
of SketchUp for desktop just moves with that stuff so much better.
And that's what makes this my fifth favorite item.
Not fifth favorite.
But number five of my favorite items in the new version of SketchUp for desktop.
So this was five things.
I wanted to show you my top five things.
This particular release, 2024 has a number—more
than I could show in this, whatever what it was 13 minutes—it goes a lot deeper.
You guys got to check it out. Check out the release notes.
We'll link to a blog that actually talks
about even more of the updates in the description down below.
Or if you're viewing this from the blog: hey!
But yeah, check out 2024. It is great.
It is just a feature packed release and some of the best
some of my favorite things that we've put into a SketchUp version.
I mean, I'm a sucker for Ambient Occlusion, honestly.
It's one of my favorite ways to view 3D geometry.
So check it out.
Let us know what you think of this.
Leave a comment down below and we'll see you later.
Thank you.