Product Reviews

SketchUp users have spent the last year in a state of some trepidation, wondering which way Google would take the application. After the bad blood engendered by releasing most of version 5 as the free Google SketchUp, the company has taken the unusual step of releasing this new whole-number release as a free upgrade for anyone with a version 5 licence. And for good measure, it's thrown in the new LayOut application (albeit still in beta) for free as well. New users will still have to fork out £315, though.

The bad news is that it's been well over a year since the last upgrade and, while the additions to the Core application are welcome, there's nothing like the jump in features in going from version 4 to 5.

PhotoMatch is the final name for SketchUp's erstwhile 'Seen That, Built It' feature. This involves importing photographs of objects (more usually buildings) and then using the PhotoMatch setup to align the perspective and vanishing points of the SketchUp workspace to those in the photo. This is done through a very simple, approachable interface, picking out known parallels and perpendiculars on the photo, and watching the vanishing points align in real time. Once set, you leave PhotoMatch mode and enter SketchOver mode: you can now draw your object using the photo as a guide. SketchUp helpfully provides you with a reference scene that always takes you back to the reference perspective. When you have enough geometry drawn in, you can project the textures in the photo onto your model with a single click. You can also import other views and match them in the same session to draw and texture details on the other side of the subject. The whole process is extremely slick.

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making workflow slicker are some nice tweaks - for example, you can now paste an object back to the same place from where it was cut, the cursor keys now constrain movement to the R, G and B axes, and certain modifier keys for the copy and AutoFold functions are now sticky.

SketchUp's ability to render 3D models in a manner reminiscent of traditional architectural drawings is bolstered by the new Styles feature. These enable you to make your model look like a 3D blueprint, a watercolour or even a Biro sketch. For product designers, there's even a marker-pen-on-detail-paper style. You can also fine-tune aspects of the style, such as jitter, overall sketchiness and ink bleed. The application ships with a library of different styles.

Some overly sketchy styles can bog down OpenGL rendering, but we're happy to report that for normal rendering, this version demonstrates considerable speed-ups in orbiting, panning and zooming the model. Complex files that would turn to jerky wireframe in the previous version now rotate in fully textured, real-time OpenGL - and this with the middling GeForce 7300 graphics card. The fact that this version is at last Intel native helps enormously, but PowerPC users have reported comparable speed gains with G5 systems.

However, not all in the OpenGL garden is lovely: the bug that causes shadows to flash when the camera is inside them persists (due to a licensing problem for the fix). This means interior animations sometimes look like they're taking place in a thunderstorm. You can, at least, still export and render in version 4, where the bug was fixed, although only in emulation on Intel systems, of course. While we're on the subject of flashing, version 6 has developed a bug that causes random corruption in some frames of exported animations. Google is aware of this and is looking for a fix. Moreover, due to a limitation of OpenGL itself, SketchUp is still single-processor only. While multi-threaded OpenGL was introduced in OS X 10.4.8, when this will be incorporated is anybody's guess.

The LayOut application is used to produce presentations for clients. It uses familiar conventions such as dragging out text boxes and frames, and it comes with a library of predefined template styles (but none in metric sizes).