Anyone still using Sketchup to create their models?

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1

Sketchup ONCE was freely available for hobby users and personal use.
As I am old school I am stuck with it since around 2015.
Using it to create 3D models was never a problem, despite being more for architectural use.
The problem always was and always will be that it won’t SUPPORT 3D printing on a design level.

Using and old version of a software is usually not a good idea, in the case of Sketchup though it is not a problem.
What versions after 2017 added had little to no impact on model making for printing, no meaningful improvement for this either.
But it did add a lot of bloat, the need to have working and still active accounts and of course a ton of things you won’t ever need.

So: Are you like me and still use Sketchup?
Did you stumble upon an older version that you can still use but struggle with the limitations?
Maybe I can help :wink:

2

Great question. In my personal opinion, I think you would be far better served learning one of the more contemporary CAD tools. But I definitely appreciate the attraction to a tool that your mouse-muscle-memory just knows instinctually. It is hard to break away. This coming from someone who had the friggen rug pulled out from them upon the release of Excel 2007 and had to relearn all the hotkeys. It really put a damper on my productivity for a while because I used to navigate the Excel keyboard like a piano virtuoso before Microsoft found a so-called ‘better way’… ■■■■ them!!!

When I got back into design I was even more out of date than you are now. My last experience was with AutoCAD Circa 1990(The developers of Sketchup) and Pro Engineer Circa 2000. So when I was looking around for a solution, I did look at Sketchup and about a dozen or so other CAD solutions. As you already know Sketchup is better suited for folks trying to show off building concepts to prospective clients.

After looking at all of the options. You really are left with three ‘dominant’ free ones. They are in no particular order:

  1. FreeCAD
  2. Fusion360
  3. Onshape

I would not recommend FreeCAD. In a word, it is just an absolute train wreck of an interface and as open-source, it’s written by committee and not to mention, the support community can be really unwelcoming… um… let’s call it what it is, they can be real assholes to anyone visiting their forum if you try to deviate from their perception of their canon.

Fusion360 is very powerful. There are a lot of fans. There is a free version too. Here is why that falls down to number 2 on my list though.

  1. They only allow 10 models at one time in their free version.
  2. They are owned by AutoCAD who has historically pulled the rug out from under its userbase by making what was once free and then charging you for it after you’ve made to much of an investment in time and energy. I consider AutoCAD to be to predatory to make a long term investment in.

OnShape has gotten my full endorsement however. It is was developed by ex-SolidWorks people. I was very leery of them at first because they were acquired by PTC which was the developer Pro Engineer and when I was a Pro-E customer, I hated them because the embodied the nickel and dime approach to bleeding their customer base. Its why my company at the time was forced to defect to SolidWorks who eventually kicked their ass in the marketplace. However, my fears of PTC taking free OnShape and doing an AutoCAD like greedy landgrab, are so far unfounded. Since they were acquired five years ago, PTC has left them alone.

Here are the advantages and disadvantage of OnShape

  1. unlimited number of models.
  • The disadvantage is that everything you make is in the public domain unless you purchase the license. That’s not an issue for me but if you work on confidential stuff, that could be a problem.
  1. The second feature is both an advantage and disadvantage depending on your situation. They are a 100% Cloud based solution.
  • The advantage to having the Cloud do the work, is that it doesn’t matter what kind of desktop hardware you have, they support Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Whereas with Fusion360, if you don’t have beefy hardware and decent graphics capability, you can quickly find yourself at the wrong end of the performance curve.
  1. The third aspect is a matter of opinion but between OnShape and Fusion360, I find OnShape the easier of the two to use.

The last point is one you may want to consider. Do a search on YouTube for CAD and 3D and see which one has more tutorials. I found that OnShape had far more tutorials and many more that lent themselves to 3D printing. This surprised me because even Josef Prusa promotes Fusion360 on his website. They have a book they publish both electronically and hard copy on the use of Fusion360 for 3D printing. It’s doubly surprising because Fusion360 has 3D printing hooks baked into it, that is until you try to use it and realize it’s just another greedy landgrab to use a service they promote.

If you want a good place to start, take a look at this video and also his tutorials are great place to start for 3D Printing enthusiasts interested in CAD.

He covers the following in his comparison

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I just ignore the pure basics and that one might have to learn a bit in order to understand the correct use of what is included in Sketchup…
Meaning I just expect that you already know how to create some basic forms and shapes, how to extrude them or create a solid model with a few lines to make it a cube.

Designing line by line is not really a great way but sometimes the only way to get certain things right.
Like when fixing some corner - far easier to draw those few lines, with or without tools, than to re-create it from scratch.
You just use push and pull to deal with it.
One of the first toolsets you probably need/want is the Solid Tools - allowing you merge, add, subtract one thing from another.
AS LONG AS both groups (that how Sketchup calls individual parts in a sketch that you combined) are SOLIDS.
You need those solid tools quite often, especially when dealing with complex operations.
No big deal to punch a hole through a cube, but trying it sideways through the round faces of a cylinder makes Sketchup to wonder if you know what you are doing - not supported…
You can’t even draw a proper circle on this cylinder face without using special tools…
As said, they never had 3D printing in mind and seem to not really bother to include it.

Even if you don’t need the Solid tools you quite often find out that once you need them on a complex model that they refuse to work - NOT A SOLID they just complain…
Sometimes it is an easy fix, like when a push operation resulted in the bottom face vanishing for no reason.
At other time you might have deleted a slightly enlarged bolt from a wingnut shape in order to give it a matching thread…
And suddenly you facing hundreds of faces, triangles and more that could be the problem, not to mention stray lines or unwanted faces…
Here a tool called Solid Inspector comes really handy!
It is old, far from perfect but able to find most problems and for some it can even provide an automated repair - that does not always work…
Anyway, with it you can usually find the errors and fix them in one way or another to get a proper solid.

Speaking of: How do you create a proper thread in Sketchup?
Very carefully! LOL
There is some additional tools to create spirals and such…
And it is not problem to create a face for the thread in question…
Obviously you would now simply use the Follow tool to extrude the thread face along the helix for your thread…
Then you wonder what this terrible mess is supposed to be…
Yes, even for something this simple you need additional tools, like Upright Extruder - to make sure a face won’t change orientation with the angle of the spiral…
I fusion, you just click to creat a hole, click again to give it a thread according to specs - in Sketchup you do all this manually, well more or less…

That’s just a tiny part with basic examples, happy to help out if you have a specific problem that won’t allow to get printing.
So why bother with something as bad as Sketchup is there is so many alternatives that do things far better?
Well…
Most of these, like Fusion, no longer provide or support any of their formerly free versions.
Others come with a rather large learning curve or might be based on concepts like Scad uses.
Let’s start with why or where Sketchup should NOT be used:
Anything organic is a true pain to create, especially if you also need to cut and trim things.
Making a sculpture in Sketchup ? Just forget about it and use Blender or such…
Need actually round shapes, like a ROUND hole of just 3mm? Good luck…
And with STL the only working export format for 3D files that our slicers understand you just don’t want models that are 20 or more mb in size…

On the other hand Sketchup is perfect if you want SMALL files.
You might have noticed that there is a lot of seemingly simple STL files out there that come with an insane triangle count.
Usually the result of people working with programs that are meant to create things for literally any other purpose than 3D printing.
Or the result of cutting and merging STL files with a program rather than doing things with the original files in the proper program.
Being able to create a true arc is great, even better if you can export things as a STEP file or such…
Do you need this level of accuracy in all cases ?
Don’t know…
All I know is that in most cases the real world difference between a 8mm hole printed as a true arch or as a 24 sided STL source can be ignored…
1.04mm for the straight lines connecting the 24 corners…
If you use 360 sides the largest difference, from the middle of the 1.04mm line is about 0.034mm - well within the margin of error in terms of printer and filament calibration…
Just factor this in and you still get holes that are more than round enough…

So if you are a user and do struggle then feel free to reply and I see what I do :wink:

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Nice to see I am not the only oldtimer struggling with companies pulling rugs - feels good!

Here’s my 5 cents worth for the modern alternatives:
Fusion I tried quite some time ago when they still had a version that was actually free and free from pesky limitations.
I really liked the ‘ease of use’ concept.
Want a hole, ok, click and you have it, no matter how complex the surface might be.
Need to chamfer an awful lot of intersecting corners? No problem…
But FOR ME it was a total nightmare as literally everything works ‘the other way around’ compared to Sketchup.
And when I was getting a bit more used to the interface and started to finally make some models to see IF it would be my next choice…
They changed the entire concept, made running a free version a nightmare and included more and more things I couldn’t really get rid of with ease to keep my custom workspace and toolbar layouts.
I simply refuse to have my models shared with the company just in order to use their software and I really dislike the concept of programs only really working (properly) with an internet connection.
For some strange reason and despite all those years no printer manufacturer or those providing Slicers considered making a matching 3D design program…

But over the many years I also noticed that the game is often played VERY dirty indeed.
Especially by the big players, like Autodesk.
For quite a while I used Inkscape for creating files for my CO2 laser.
A guy provided a few customisations allowing to turn your sketched into matching G-code right away - and to send it to the machine.
Buggy as hell but if it did not crash the results were great.
Then a major update was announced with lots of bug fixes and many new feature - it never happened.
Autodesk offered him a nice and undisclosed deal in order to ‘implement’ his code into their products…
In other words: They never implemented anything but made sure something that COULD have turned into a great alternative was no longer available.
And there were a lot of promising 3D programs back in the day.
None of them perfect, some of them seemed to aim at young kids in terms of simplicity but they all had a great potential for their advertised use.
Be it Microsoft, Google, Samsung or again Autodesk - they all snatched up what they could.
One day I stumbled upon a Lego like design program, clearly meant for all those who never tried computer design before.
Create little, simple shapes, arrange them and them merge or subtract to get the shapes you need.
Create a sphere and pull it to become an egg, add some cylinders for legs and arms…
You get the idea…
Microsoft snatched it up, developed it a bit further and then took it down for good LOL
And this continued wherever a promising program appeared that did not get massive user number right away or had the (financial) backing of enough supporters.
Fusion wouldn’t be what it is today, including all this animation and physics stuff if not for the contribution of an endless amount of developers who saw selling as the best and fastest way to make money.

I understand only too well how much it hurts to have your work stolen…
So I do understand that no one wants to develop a great piece of software for free.
But in my time you could just BUY software and with this had all updates included, not just for a year or so…
Today though nothing seems to work without (verified) accounts and being online when using an app.
Imagine a simplified, fully free version of Fusion that works fully OFFLINE…
Give it the design tools required, limit the rest to what is really needed and add a simplified interface that the user can customise.
No need to go overboard either as I wouldn’t mind paying an acceptable price to get addons, like to animate my designs or do stress tests.
Autodesk would have no problem striking a nice deal with all meaningful hosters…
If the license allows for it a model could be offered not just with the STL or STEP files but with the original Autodesk file in order to customise the model to another user’s needs.
And thanks to their file format it would be VERY easy to go after those stealing models to provide them elsewhere (for money).
A win for everyone, one that we know will never come…

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You said it well. AutoCAD has an extremely long record of screwing their user base, especially by acquiring companies and tech and then either changing the rules to the detriment of the user base or simply burying the tech. Sadly, Autodesk runs more like a private equity company and is extremely predatory. I believe the only peer they have in this kind of predatory tactic is perhaps Adobe. Adobe recently enforced licensing fees on products that previously had no fees. This put a lot of small creative agencies in a bind because they had so much invested in Adobe products that they couldn’t just cut them loose, and Adobe knew this.

I believe in Venture Capital circles, the term most popular for this type of acquisition is called “acquisition for elimination.”

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Starting to wonder IF there might be more to it than what it seems…

I mean, look at it this way:
When we finally got 3D printers and filaments at (more or less) affordable prices we had design software that was on par with it.
As in, both being way below expectations…
But the more the creative design world evolved the fewer the available options became.

We basically have three fractions here.

  1. Companies that COULD make their design software 3D printing friendly refusing to do so.
  2. Companies like Autodesk, Alphabet, Microsoft and so on removing possible competition by all means.
  3. The movie industry…

For number one we can think about all sorts of reasons, including not wanting to ‘taint’ the image of award winning software by abusing for 3D printing.
Number two we see all around us all the time, the big ones take care of those below.
But number three is often overlooked in terms of THEIR influence.
Take Blender - a software no one ever heard about and that barely anyone used - until some movie studios disclosed that THEY use it for many of their CGI creations…
Suddenly Blender was everywhere LOL
Apart from that we have seen numerous times how software was exclusively created for the needs of movie effects and movie animations.
A lot of these programs started as open source projects…

One might wonder if it all comes down to a very simple thing…
Like making it VERY hard for creative designers to design anything without having to pay…
My days of hacking, coding and programming are long over.
I gave up when things started to change faster than I could keep with to learn the changes in the various programming languages.
But I am tempted to make a call on some nice page to get creative script kids, students and anyone with meaningful skills together to create a simple design program that combines the actual design and the printing.
Take the best of all worlds, make it as intuitive and user friendly as possible while also making sure it has the power to design complex models.
We can download a package and quickly create virtual worlds, games and apps - how hard can it be to come up with a 3D design program that actually works…
Very, I know :frowning:

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I hear you…I really do…

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Fusion cloud storage allows a model to be in one of two states, editable or read-only.

Fusion allows 10 editable models in their cloud storage at one time in their free version.

Fusion does not limit the number of read-only models in cloud storage.

You can change an editable model to read-only or read-only to editable any time you like with just a few clicks. Working within the ten editable files cloud limit is just a matter of file management.

You can export as many models as you like to your computer and not use the cloud storage at all.

You can open, edit, and re-export a local Fusion file even if your ten editable cloud slots are full. You just can’t save it to their cloud without deleting another editable file or making one read-only.

I don’t consider even this ten file “limit” to be much of a restriction since I rarely edit more than one model at a time. I’ve never worked on more than three at one time. I currently only have one model in the Fusion cloud, a few dozen on my computer. Completed models worth keeping are stored locally, zipped together with their exported .step and their slicer . 3mf files.