Product ReviewsMultimedia software
While many people are familiar with Google's free SketchUp, the Pro version is a suite of applications comprising SketchUp Pro for modelling rendering and animation, LayOut for putting together presentations, and Style Builder, a utility that allows you to create hand-drawn effects (styles) that can be applied to SketchUp models. At first glance, SketchUp doesn't seem to have changed much since its last release. The feedback icons for its trademark snaps and inferences have, however, been made much clearer, and lines that cross each other now break automatically where they cross, which eliminates the previous arcane method for achieving this. Workflow improvements include direct linking to image editors. If you need to edit a texture that you've applied to your model, it will automatically open your chosen bitmap editor and update the edited texture within SketchUp without having to re-import it. Also, the Component browser is more tightly integrated with the 3D warehouse, allowing searches and downloads of models directly from within SketchUp. As for OpenGL, first the bad news: the shadow volume bug is still there. This Flickering shadow problem is made worse, because version 4 (where the bug was fixed) doesn't run under Leopard, so exporting and rendering in the earlier version is no longer an option without first rebooting into Tiger. The good news is that OpenGL speed for orbiting, zooming and panning has seen a boost over the already-nippy version 6. Animation output speed has also been increased - about four times faster on average on a 2GHz dual-core iMac - while output of large-format stills renders showed an increase in speed of around 30%. There's also a feature to anti alias textures that should cut down on moiré effects in animated output. A new toolbar has been added - Dynamic Components - and this is where the meat of this upgrade lies. Instances of components have always updated automatically when any single instance is edited, but Dynamic Components allow for far more intelligent behaviour to be built in. Probably the easiest example to quote is a staircase: the number of steps in a staircase varies with floor height. Dynamic Components allow you to build behaviours into a stair component, so that when it's scaled to span between two floors it automatically re-draws itself with the correct number of steps. In previous versions, scaling a component would simply distort it. For the stair example, the dynamic nature is provided by the Dynamic Component being built out of sub-components representing a tread, balustrade and handrail. The Dynamic Component then repeats this sub-component as necessary. Dynamic Components are parametric, that is, they contain various fields for data input. This also means that they can be remodelled by entering new values for certain parametric measurements. While no programming experience
Other behaviours can also be built in, such as the ability to cycle through a series of colours/textures or have a door component swing open. These behaviours are accessed by clicking on a Dynamic Component with the new Interact tool. The parametric capabilities also make it possible to generate reports for components in a SketchUp model. A model rarely ends its life within the application itself, instead it's usually exported as stills or animations to a variety of programs for communication to clients. LayOut aims to streamline this process by integrating tightly with SketchUp. It feels a lot like a standard DTP package - you're given a list of page templates to start with or you can define your own - but the important exception is how LayOut hotlinks SketchUp models into its pages. You can start by choosing Insert from the file menu, which will place the last view of the model into a viewport. You can then drag it to where you want on your page. The views, once imported, are beautifully anti-aliased, ready for hard copy output. You can also opt to change the view displayed to any one of the scenes in the original SketchUp model, or the standard orthogonal views. However, double-clicking on the view port will also allow the model to be rotated using SketchUp's standard view tools to any new view you require. Deselecting the viewport then re-draws the anti-aliased view, although this can take time to update on complex models. It's then a case of using the tools to lay out your pages. The drawing and manipulation tools have been re-worked, particularly the Bézier curve tool. Familiar concepts like grouping, layers, sending forward and backward are all there and will be familiar to users of DTP packages. Not so familiar will be the presentation mode. Since client communication generally depends both print and slideshow, LayOut has the ability to turn any project into a full-screen presentation, with the ability to step through pages of a layout by using the arrow keys. This obviates the need to send the same assets to two different programs, greatly saving time and overhead. In presentation mode, it's also possible to annotate slides in real time, and any animation that's stored in the original SketchUp file can be played in a viewport. This raises a problem, though. SketchUp's real-time animation playback is pretty clunky on anything other than relatively simple models - and it gets almost unusable if shadows are switched on. This leaves the question of why LayOut has no support for embedding QuickTime movies - or even Flash animations. This would greatly improve the interactivity of presentations. Worthy of note is LayOut's ability to print out true-scale drawings using just a few clicks, and its new ability to render resolution-independent vector output. The changes since its last release may be underwhelming, though those elements that have been changed are handy. Dynamic Component, for example, has a lot of potential waiting to be explored. The increases in speed that SketchUp's engineers have achieved in software could only be otherwise achieves by spending £250 on a graphics card. If only they'd find a fix for that shadow bug. By Tim Danaher |
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