Sketchup Blog - News and Notes from the Sketchup folks

Sometimes you need more than a model

LayOut 2 is:
1) included with SketchUp Pro 7
2) out of Beta
3) available today!

What's LayOut? Well, it's like this...

Say you've got kids (like I do) and they've snookered you into working on a design for the new playground at their elementary school. "No problem!" you say, and you whip up a a great design and model it like a pro in SketchUp. Project done, right? Well... now the Principal would like to see the design, as would the president of the PTO. And then the fund raising committee would like a nice picture to display at the bake sale. The well-meaning contractor needs to know what it looks like, and wants to get the landscaping started today. They all think your model is great, and they all want a copy of it. Right now.

What you need is LayOut: the easy-to-use documentation tool for SketchUp models. With LayOut, you drop your SketchUp model into a pre-built document template (with professional titleblock and everything), generate a quick set of scaled drawings for the contractor, and a nice presentation perspective for the bake sale. And when you're done, you email a PDF file to everyone on the project and give the Principal a polished slide presentation in his office from your laptop.



Funds are raised, the playground is built, the kids are heroes with their friends and everybody's happy! In fact, everything is going great now, except the kids (inspired by your success with the playground) would now like you to get them a puppy. You're on your own with that one...

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8 comments :

Anonymous said...

I wish you had spent the time and manpower on the core modeling capabilities in SketchUp itself, or at least fixed the damned shadow problem in it. I have a CAD program. I don't need Layout, and never had.

Anonymous said...

V7 Pro is hugely disappointing- after 2 years of waiting. Nearly all of the improvements are in LayOut- which needs to be better that Abobe CS3 for us to consider using. The other main area of focus is components- which was plenty good- we are again unlikely to spend a lot of time building smartness into it- SketchUp Pro does not need to be a BIM tool!

Anonymous said...

'Some times you need more than a model'. I had to laugh as the layOut video has just showed what happened to me last week. I submitted my Technical Illustration (modeled in Sketch-up, exported and minor work done in a paint program only to be told of last minute modifications even after it had been approved before I did the final export. Back to the model, change, export, paint etc - I did not finishing till after midnight! The Beta version of LayOut with SketchUp 6 ran sooo slow (and hung) that I could not use it on my PC. Looking forward to using Sketch-up 7 with Lay Out.

Ziggy Folkmanis said...

why did they decide to concentrate on Layout so much? I would have been far more interested in improvements to the essential aspect of 3d modelling - Layout is of very little interest to me - it's easy enough to do presentations in any dedicated page layout program from screenshots and rendered image files.

Anonymous said...

Just because something is of no interest to you personally you shouldn't assume that applies to the whole marketplace.

Sketchup has moved out from the initial user base of architects. For furniture designers like me Dynamic Components are worth their weight in gold and layout makes it so simple to present a custom suite of designs to a client.

Anonymous said...

it really bugs me that this program has so much potential yet they've completley neglected high poly support I've been specifically waiting for this new version hoping google would implememnt it "why havent you guys done it?" seems like a no brainer. look at the silver shadows work on the sketchucation forums showing what you can do with sketchup. while it is poossible to create high poly models it's extremely difficult to keep them stable and not crash
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=10549

it's almost bordering incompetency not to implemenet high poly when the likes of blender which is free and infinitley more complicated can do it and sketchup which prides itself on simplicity doesnt

MAKE OUR LIVES EASIER GOOGLE!

Anonymous said...

I've been using SU for last year and half, as per my work i used 3dmax,and autocad for 3d graphics. and found sketch up so simple,handy and fulling software for me. I'm enjoying working on sketchup. wounder if google can provide Sketchup as pocket pc software. which i bleave be possible for the time where pocket pc taking over ordinary mobile.
great software ""google""

Anthony said...

a puppy eh...we have a goat on our library, would that be any good!