SketchUp for iPad: 3D Visualization on iPad | Hacker News Reader

SketchUp for iPad: 3D Visualization on iPad

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94 pointsTomte49 comments

I started using Sketchup in 2005, I think, and got pretty good at it, even doing some paid projects. I found it's approach to 3D modeling intuitive. I have yet to find another 3D modeling tool that works this way or is nearly as intuitive (Tinkercad comes closest for me). I don't use SketchUp enough to justify the licensing fees they've been wanting for many years, now. $119 is close enough I'm tempted, but having to use it in a browser when I'm using it for the purpose of 3D printing does not sound fun.

Anyone have any recommendations for similar apps—i.e. apps that are focused on architecture/industrial design (not character modeling) that don't expect you to do CAD as soon as anything gets interesting?

I'm in the same exact boat. I haven't found any good alternative, but Sketchup in the browser is a much worse product than the old free Sketchup app was.

Try https://www.spacesapp.io/

I found fusion 360 even easier to pick up than SketchUp, and it can do a lot of things that SketchUp just can't. Highly recommend trying it out.

I used to love Fusion 360, but I eventually moved to Linux and couldn't use my school's copy, so I gave it up. I've mostly used Blender to replace it, and while their workflows are definitely not 1:1 comparable, Blender can still do 90% of the things Fusion can, with a much more palatable price tag.

Is it suitable for engineering drawings (or just graphics design)?

It's a weird middle-ground. Blender's workflow is more comparable to Sketchup than it is to Fusion, but it has a ton of mesh editing capabilities that blow Sketchup and Fusion out of the water. The downside is that it doesn't really account for engineering stuff out of the box, but I've certainly used it to 3D print things in the past.

It's not a drop-in replacement, but since I'm already pretty familiar with the tool, I don't really have trouble making it work. YMMV.

Fusion 360 is free for hobbyists tho? So the price tag is about the same either way. Although Blender is a lot cheaper if you're doing professional work or need to upgrade F360.

And for students. There is even a little documented (imo) way to use it on the browser with a student account. Autodesk basically runs an instance of fusion360 remotely for you in a VM for free.

https://fusion.online.autodesk.com

Fusion360's parametric modelling approach was a breeze to pick up after struggling with SketchUp for a while. Being a software developer probably helped as I was immediately comfortable with the formulas, variables, and constraints.

Yeah I love it. It made it easy to tweak various details of my design after I established the basic shape.

The pricing is a bit off, and there isn’t a lot of innovation in today’s product compared to the one from ten years ago. The free web browser version has materialised from Pro license fees, but I don’t use or want a browser-based version.

It's disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a "hobbyist" price tier. Maybe that's what the "web" product is intended for.

I went with Shapr3d, originally on the iPad but I believe they have a Mac version now as well. I've found it fairly intuitive for my light complexity projects.

I'm also a fan of Shapr3d on my iPad Pro it's a great app.

I tried shapr - it’s a lovely app, but the free version is extremely limited (only two files!) and $240 per year for the cheapest paid option is pretty steep.

Agreed. I'm a founder of a 3d design & printing shop; of the three of us, one prefers Fusion, one prefers TinkerCAD, and I prefer Shapr3D. It really distills Fusion down; taking the, maybe, 40% of Fusion that 70% of people use 90% of the time, and making it great. If you need the high-high-pro stuff, it probably doesn't have it; but its so rare for me to need it, and the experience is so much smoother & faster. Moreover its modeling... model... its modeling model is practically identical to Fusion, unlike TinkerCAD or Vectary, so if you need that extra oomph, transitioning over to Fusion for that model has been easy for me.

Its biggest issue right now for me is working with text. For example, sketching text on a model then extruding it to type on the model. They finally, like last year, added a text tool; its bad; primarily in the sense that you have to specify the size of the text upfront, the size you specify means literally nothing with respect to the model (just an integer). So its a dance of "op 20 is too big, lets try 18, lets try 15, ok 16 isn't perfect but fine". To be frank, I don't know how it existed for so long, at multi-hundreds-of-dollars per year, without this basic feature, and I can't imagine anyone involved feels pride in its state today.

It also doesn't have any document sync capability, which is unfortunate because, generally, getting files on and off iPads is a hassle; and Shapr3D's Windows & Mac apps have to my usage perfect parity.

I suggest using an older version of SketchUp with a lifetime license. Outside of 3D Warehouse access, there's not much to be gained from their recent updates. I want to love the web version, but it's SO slow compared to the desktop version, even a desktop version running in a x86 CPU emulated Windows box on my ARM laptop. And the keybaord shortcuts all changed! I can't give up 15 years of muscle memory.

3D modelling is a desktop task. I can see using the iPad in the field and when collaborating and maybe swapping some prebuilt objects but going from blank to completed design is happing on multiple monitors with a mouse and keyboard.

Have you tried onshape? It’s honestly pretty fantastic, and I think it shows that you can have good browser based CAD that can run on non-desktop hardware.

Downside to onshape is its generally a different use case than SketchUp. I use both for work and almost no overlap in their applications for me.

It's not quite what you asked, but I like OnShape for CAD. I mostly do 3D printing. Its approach to constraints took some getting used to, but it's sort of fun in a puzzle-solving kind of way.

It's free if you don't mind all your designs being public. I don't mind since I'm just using it for fun.

Well, Sketchup itself fits the bill and can be used for free more or less indefinitely. I have used it to design an extension to our house, a 22x12 meter barn, a lean-to for my wife's horses, an octagonal chicken coop and much more. The drawings are accurate enough to use as templates for cutting wood to build trusses.

How to use Sketchup for as long as you need it? The solution lies in using Wine on Linux (or wherever you want to run it) to run Sketchup. Once Sketchup tells you the trial period is over - 30 days for Sketchup 2016, the version I use - you just wipe the relevant Wine directory and re-install Sketchup. Here's a script to automate this whole business:

   #!/bin/sh

   export WINEARCH=win32
   export WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.wine-sketchup
   export WINE=$(which wine)
   export sketchup_msi=/home/username/Downloads/SketchUp2016-x86.msi
   export gecko_msi=/home/username/Downloads/wine_gecko-2.40-x86.msi
   export vblank_mode=0
   export DRI_PRIME=1

   help () {
   echo <<-END
    use: $0 [-r] [-h]
   
    -r: reset sketchup (does a complete reinstall)
    -h: this help message
   END
   }

   sketchup_reset () {
    rm -rf $WINEPREFIX
    winetricks win7
    winetricks corefonts 
    winetricks vcrun2010 
    winetricks dotnet40 
    msiexec /i $gecko_msi
    winetricks win7
    msiexec /i $sketchup_msi
   }
   
   config () {
    winecfg
   }

   while getopts "chr" OPTION
   do
   case $OPTION in
   r)
    sketchup_reset
    ;;
   c)
    config
    exit
    ;;
   h)
    help
    exit
    ;;
   esac
   done

   $WINE "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/Program Files/SketchUp/SketchUp 2016/SketchUp.exe"

As a not very skilled CAD drawer I went with Designspark Mechanical, which makes it very simple to go from a 2D sketch to a 3D model. I believe it is freeware but does require registration.

I've seen some good things about BricsCAD shape; free, similar workflows to sketchup, ability to open/load sketchup models, a couple of more advanced modeling features as well. Comes bundled with the full BricsCAD package which can be used for a few days free, but you don't actually need to touch it. From the little I've played with it, it seemed pretty good.

I've switched mostly to other open source CAD software and use an old desktop installation of sketchup 2017 when I still want to simply "sketch" a quick and dirty model, so I've not really used Brics. I've also heard some people don't like it, but it seems so few people know about it, it's hard to find many unbiased reviews/critiques of it.

I wouldn't mind getting an iPad CAD program that wasn't:

a) a subscription

b) scalping, in the sense that most I've seen are toys or pretty much only let you manage a single project

There seems to be a huge gap between "let's view 3D models people designed else where" and "let's design insanely detailed stuff". All I want to do are mildly complex 3D printed enclosures, and all the decent apps are completely over the top.

The product looks similar to Shapr3d - but the framerate is hilariously worse than Shapr3d. Shapr3d runs at 120fps, and it's quite cool to see in person on an iPad.

Shapr3d is awesome, but it has an even more ridiculously overpriced subscription for enthusiasts. Sketchup at least has the benefit of a large community, asset marketplace, and a lot of people using their file format outside of CAD trades.

I too was about to comment about the frame rate. You can clearly see the lag in their presentation video and that's not reassuring as this model looks like it's got less than 20K triangles.

Are they not using Metal?

Way too expensive. Why does everything have to be a subscription?

You'll likely need to subscribe to an industry newsletter to find out why.

Because, nearly 100% of the time, a subscription is cheaper for the average end user, especially one who doesn't want to be stuck using some old version that they paid for a decade ago but have used relatively sparingly/non-professionally.

Doing the math, this doesn't seem to be the case for CAD.

In 2016 (last year before subscription), Autocad was $1495/head ($1795 corrected). In 2022, the 3 year subscription is $4410, or $1470/year.

So, assuming you upgrade every 3 years, it's 3x more expensive now.

Looking at Autodesk profits [1], there was no real growth until 2014, then a steady drop towards 2016, which probably raised the alarms and required them to change something. After the subscription, there has been steady growth, with a little more than 2x from 2016 to 2022.

But, in the grand scheme of things, $122/month is really nothing for a professional user, which AutoCAD is targeted at.

1. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ADSK/autodesk/reve...

These companies aren't moving to a subscription model because its cheaper for the users

No, they just do it to mask the TCO of their product. Dumb people pay more. End of story.

I think the answer is somewhere in between. Looking at their growth shortly before implementing this, the conclusion of y ourreductionist statement would appear to be that smart people cause companies to eventually go bankrupt. Obviously, it's not as simple as cheap = good.

Companies are in general happy with paying subscriptions since it's from their operational expense (OPEX). Why companies prefer it that way is another question. But they do.

Soooo much of the CAD industry is going this way. It sucks. Luckily there's still very good products you can buy permanent licenses for (bricscad, ironcad, zw3d, more), but way more of the big names are just trying to squeeze their customers.

It sucks. But it's predictable pricing for companies buying it and it's predictable revenue streams for the makers of the software (that's if no one jumps boat en-masse).

SketchUp used to be the go-to entry level 3D modelling tool, but it seems like Tinkercad took its place. Free to use, and it feels much more intuitive -- a handful of well-scoped primitive tools that chain together nicely into a surprisingly powerful editor.

Wasn’t this product owned by Google at some point? What happened to that?

It was a rounding error at Google in terms of profit, and one of the SketchUp founders convinced them to sell it instead of shut it down.

Included with the sale was a nice Espresso machine from the Google Boulder office.

I have thought Sketchup to hundreds of people in online and in person classes. Nowadays I don't do that anymore because Trimble effectively killed off a vibrant community by putting Sketchup desktop behind a paywall.

I think the web version is great, but it doesn't have extensions, and it has limited exporting functionality. You can't have the freedom you used to have in 2018 anymore.

I think Sketchup was at it's best when it was under Google. Their interest was to put it in more hands for the sake of Google Earth. So they gave users a lot of freedom.

I stopped using sketchup entirely when they went to the browser version.

I still have an old version I use to open up files I made before they locked the desktop version behind a paywall.

I started learning blender instead and in the long run was much better off for it.

The story of SketchUp mirrors the story of the internet a lot IMO. Once a beautiful product that people wanted to explore, invent, help, have fun, create, enjoy. Then it's popularity drew in the "big pockets" and it all went downhill. I made a lot of money from my skill with SketchUp professionally but I long for those young boy days. If I get to heaven they will have SketchUp on Linux and I will know that I have lived a good life.

Google selling SketchUp rather than open sourcing it is another one of Google’s horrible product decisions.

Can’t try the app in any way without creating an account?

Unnecessary friction. They could accomplish the same thing and probably lose less users with some more flexibility to see what the app can do. Lame.

Has anyone tried using it with Apple Pencil yet? I'm curious to know how usable it is compared to the desktop/web version.

Meta: I think having 2/7 words in the title, a whopping 29%, be "iPad", is a lot.

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