@Last Software SketchUp 5 review

It might sound simple, but in practice it's awkward and inflexible - you can only 'Smoove' objects vertically, for example - and the end results rarely look completely smooth and natural. To workaround these limitations, SketchUp 5 includes an Add Detail tool for breaking down areas of the TIN into a finer mesh, and a Flip Edge tool for manually adjusting triangulation to avoid plateaus, but these just highlight the inherent complexity of the system. We can't imagine many SketchUp users making regular use of the Sandbox tools and @Last Software seems to admit as much, as the tools aren't even switched on by default - you need to enable them via the new Extensions Manager.

Ultimately, its sandbox capabilities, which @Last is pushing as the major selling point of this latest release, prove a disappointment. However, you can still get the benefits of combining SketchUp's planar models with more organic mesh-based models, thanks to version 5's most welcome, although relatively hidden, advance: the ability to import models from 3ds max. So, for now, leaving organic modelling to traditional mesh-based modellers makes much more sense and allows SketchUp to concentrate on what it does best - enabling the fast, creative development of non-organic models.

Author: Tom Arah