Sketchup is now free … well mac version available soon !!!
or some kind of ‘light’ version anyway …
In the very least it gives you an unlimited trial to learn how to use SketchUp before buying the pro version.
Giving away the free version is part of Google’s mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.”. They are hoping people will use it to build virtual versions of real-world places and then these can be made part of Google Earth. It is a cool idea.
So what features have been cut out of this “free” version?
Looks like any exporting to something useful in Unity is out. It’s basically for exporting to Google Maps or printing hard copies on a printer and that’s it. 
Apart from Unity, however, that’s pretty cool. It’s a perfect tool for that sort of thing.
Last time I tried the Mac version it just exploded all over the place. What advantages does this have over a real modeling application? Blender has the same price tag and it seems much better.
True you can do a lot of the same things in Blender. And the free Blender version has great Unity support, where as this looks like it may not allow exporting at all.
SketchUp is great for rapidly getting an idea down tho. But the high price tag just made it unreasonable.
That seems reasonable. Personally, I never understood the novelty of getting a quick prototype done when it means you just have to do it over again. I can see how it would come in handy in specific corporate type settings but I’m a one man band and I have not been in a situation where I had to wow a client by noon tomorrow… with 3D, I mean.
Wow, SketchUp for free? I bet my students will love that! (Apart from the ones who just bought it. 
)
SketchUp is pretty solid now… I use it in commercial design work, and while it isn’t perfect or the answer to all modelling problems, it’s good for what I’m doing.
The main benefit of SketchUp over Blender is that it’s much better for making measured models of things which need to be accurate and regularly shaped, such as buildings (or even spaceships or other kinds of machine). I’d hate to have to make a model of a building in Blender!
On the other hand, its texturing tools are pretty bad, so you might want to take the model into Blender for texturing. Use the right tools for the right part of the job.
I highly doubt that you will be able to export anything from the free version. Can someone with windows try it out and see what limitations were put on it?
Just because it’s rapid, doesn’t mean it’s for prototyping only. 
Good point. Here’s the list of differences between the free and pro versions. Exporting to useful 3D formats is only available in the pro version.
However… notice that Ruby scripting is still available in the free version. Who wants to write their own exporter?
Is that even possible? The export thing?
I would love that. As has been stated, build it in Sketchup, texture it in Blender (for me at least), then toss it into Unity. Of course they have to actually finish the Mac version first.
Looks like it is. The SketchUp Ruby documentation lists a PolygonMesh class which has methods for iterating over the polygons in a mesh. I presume it’d be (relatively) trivial to use this to output something like an .obj file.
Not that I want to spend time doing it.
That could be very very sweet.
I resurrect this thread using dark spooky necromancy.
I found myself a project that could benefit from Sketchup. This version no longer explodes, and thusly I approve of it strongly. I tried it… it only exports kmz files for google earth. These are a zip file of a bit of googleized xml and a standard collada dae file.
How good is blenders collada support? I know it has lame blender functionality but that responsibility has been handed off to Illusoft. How is compatability on the blender side of things? Anybody try using a sketchup dae in blender yet? I’d do it now but i’m on Windows 2000 at work (nooooooooooooooooooo!).
Lastly, if the Collada import is up to par, then would it not be relitively trivial to just include google/earth kmz import straight up in blender?.. streamline it a bit.
Thinking of rapid development solutions for architectual visualization.
…my excitement and lack of systemwide spell checking has hindered my ability to write, apparently.
Well I tried it and it says the file is corrupted.
So i tried a blender exported dae and it says that is corrupted too.
AweXome.
not tried this … but you may find this useful … a python script for Blender to directly import kml/kmz
It probably wasn’t the intention of Google to make the free version too useful, so I don’t know when that avenue will be closed down, if possible.
Paul
Going back to this idea, I mentioned it to a friend of mine from iDevGames, and he wrote a script to export from the free version of SketchUp to .obj format.
He posted the script to this thread on the iDevGames forum, in this post.
I suspect that his script won’t be very general purpose without some degree of extra work, but it’s probably not too difficult to adapt it to perform specific jobs. Also, if you’re feeling clever, you could adapt it to export other formats… even FBX!