Speckle + Sketchup: Connector in Beta 🎉

Sunshine Canyon House - Max Achkovsky

Where We Were 🧐

As you may know, Speckle has had a Sketchup Connector for a while as an alpha release. Thank you to all the community members who have provided feedback and contributions; we’ve made it better, more robust and user-friendly.

What's New 🆕

Our team has been growing quite a bit in the last year, Oguzhan joined us in November and focussed exclusively on this connector. Thanks to his expertise, he’s already been able to do wonders in such a short period of time, effectively rebuilding from the ground up. We’re very excited to have him on board and can only dream of what’s coming next!

What's Next 🧑‍💻

What are our plans for the Sketchup Connector?

We want to make it easy for users to store versions of their Sketchup models on the Speckleverse without any data loss. This will allow you to keep track of changes to your models over time and collaborate with team members more seamlessly. In the longer term, we have a roadmap of features and want to enable workflows between different design software.

Features

• [2.10 ✅] Preserving Faces on send and receive
• [2.11 ✅] Sending/Receiving Layer information
• [2.11 ✅] Create Stream button
• [2.11 ✅] Support for Always Face to Camera Components
• [2.11 ✅] Settings Dialog: We’ll store a bunch of options under this dialog.
• [2.11 ✅] Include Attributes: We’ll add an option to the settings dialog, so if you don’t need your attributes in Speckleverse, you don’t have to send them anymore.
• [2.11 ✅] Merge Faces on Send: This can be especially useful for users who are not interested in receiving their model back in Sketchup and want to view it in the web viewer or receive it on another platform.
• [2.11 ✅] Create Branch 🌴 button**:** Create a new branch within the connector UI.
• [2.11 ✅] Scenes to Speckle Views: This feature will allow you to view your Sketchup scenes in Speckle viewer.
• [2.12 🚧] Add Commit by URL 🔗 button:  With this, users can receive public commits.
• [2.12 🚧] Advanced Settings for Attributes 🏷: Add option for including/excluding attributes on edges, faces, components and groups.
• Preserving Group/Component Names on Receive: When components are received in Sketchup, they are given GUID as their name because we need to keep track of elements somehow. We will implement a feature that allows components to retain their original names when transferred between Sketchup and Speckle while still tracking objects. This will make it easier for users to identify and keep track of their components.
• ✨ NEW Desktop UI: We will develop a new user interface for our Speckle connector for Sketchup. This redesign will allow us to align our connector with the rest of the Speckle connectors, expand its functionalities, improve its performance, and provide a better user experience.
• Continuous Traversal: Apart from all these features, we also work parallelly on different plugin architectures to enable users to make diffing in their model. This will bring better UX and provide a robust send/receive process.

What Workflows 🤔

Revit ▶ Sketchup 😍

One of the exciting new workflows we want to enable with the Speckle SketchUp connector is the ability to receive Revit models directly in SketchUp. Here are some key features we want to ship:

• Receive Revit categories as Layers
• Map Revit categories to Existing Layers
• Receive Families as Components
• Map Family Instances to Sketchup components
• Parameters as Component Attributes
• Map Revit Materials to existing Sketchup materials

Sketchup ▶ Revit 💥

Another workflow we want to enable is the ability to send SketchUp models directly to Revit as BIM elements, similar to our Rhino Mapping Tool(alpha). This feature is ideal for users looking to utilise SketchUp's easy and fast modelling tools while also taking advantage of Revit's extensive BIM capabilities. Some key features:

• Components to Revit families
• Map Components to existing family types
• Geometries as DirectShapes with Categories
• Faces to Floors/Walls/Ceilings
• Edges to Structural Framing (Columns/Beams)
• Topography support
• Attributes to Revit Parameters
• Map Attributes to Revit Parameters
• Sketchup scenes to Revit Views
• Map Sketchup materials to Revit materials

Your Input 💬

We value your feedback and input; if there’s any feature you feel strongly about, let us know so we can prioritize it more. We are excited to be able to give Sketchup connector the attention it deserves and can't wait to see what the future holds for it. 🤩

We're excited to see how you use the new beta version of the SketchUp connector, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback. So download the latest version now, try it, and let us know your thoughts!