I can’t imagine how much it must suck to be a VR dev when you can’t engage with half the content. The only thing that’s ever been to much for me is spiderman VR.
Adjustable line thickness
I take the point of view that VR technology is not ready yet. The very old CRT monitors could cause dizziness for various reasons; with time, it was fixed. The problem with VR is more software than hardware, but otherwise it is similar. I’m sure that technological improvements will help, but most importantly, tools and APIs and knowledge will develop over time until applications are safe by default. For now, anyway, a large portion of VR content is either cinematic or games and I’m not feeling particularly bad about not being able to enjoy half of them.
Thanks for this.
navigation seems to be working fine online,
transparent lines are now solid- looks great.
looking left and right is definitely much much better.
Dimensions unfortunately don’t seem to work properly as invisible layers are still in the way.
Also, is there a way of adjusting section line thickness?
Will keep eye open for more.
Many thanks!
Interaction with dynamic components also works a treat now- thanks. It would be good if they didn’t revert status in editing mode but we’ve been there before 
Not tested for shared status of interractive objects (all viewers see the same thing) when the model is in collaboration mode (whether online or local connection)
Also not tested to see whether all viewers in collaboration mode see the same light setting. This would be most welcome, please.
Also, can we have X-ray mode, pretty please?! And, just like with the fog settings, can we please adjust the opacity so that there is only as deep as you can see through a wall as you allow it. This would be immensely useful in identifying structures behind walls without making layers invisible. Not sure I saw this done anywhere else in a cad program so that could be your own lovely little innovation
Finally, when in section mode, not sure how difficult it would be to have clipped shadows as an additional view setting. the shadow setting as you have it now is still very useful as it can give you a truer sense of how deep direct sunlight penetrates a building but for presentation purposes, clipped shadows would be better. I can tell tho’ that the section mode is pretty task intensive… so this may add to the challenge of keeping the rendering ‘light’ .
Thank you!
Oops, found why the tape measure tool still didn’t ignore invisible layers. Fixed.
The section line is rendered like a normal edge so far, but maybe it could be a bit thicker.
X-ray mode is very hard to do if we want to keep a minimum of performance. The problem is that in that mode, all faces everywhere are visible and must be drawn. This can take many, many times longer than a regular scene, because there, even though all the faces are theoretically drawn too, most of them are behind other faces and the GPU is extremely good at figuring this out and dropping them without further processing. And I mean extremely good: it takes longer for the GPU to load the 3 positions defining each triangle from its main memory than doing all the math needed to figure out the triangle is behind something else. So far, I don’t see a way to do it. Even if you want only one level of see-through, i.e. see through the first face but stop at the second one, then it might double the time taken.
Shadows in section mode: do you mean that the problem is that the geometry that is hidden by the section plane no longer cast a shadow? And you would like the option to keep the original shadow of the complete, un-cut model? Yes, this would be easy to add.
Dimensions: super, thx!
Thicker section lines would be great, please - thx.
X-ray: I thought that would be the case 
Maybe for the next gen headsets
Shadows: not a problem, just nice option to have- thx.
Thicker section lines: done!
Shadows of geometry hidden by the section plane: done too. It’s an option in the section plane’s context menu. You can set these shadows to On, Off, or Half-strength… For the last one I found a simple way to implement it, so why not. It would be much harder to implement proper partial-strength (or even colored!) shadows when the light goes through a half-transparent material. But it turns out that in this simple case, we can use dithering: half the pixels opaque, half the pixels fully transparent. With the smoothing we do at the end anyway, it makes a half-strength shadow.
X-ray: if the goal is to see behind walls, I can think of some other approaches that could be implemented efficiently, but they might be too gimmicky. For example, you could have a tool like a laser pointer, but the faces it points to are drawn transparently, up to some depth (configurable?). It’s a lot less costly to find faces that touch a line and render 5 or 10 of them transparent, than it is to render everything in the whole model transparent.
Well, very interesting! The same reason why I mentioned the fog in my earlier message, something that allows you to set a depth. Actually, I also do not see how being able to see the whole model in XRay in VR (unlike in SketchUp) could be anything else than disorienting and so, totally useless.
But being to locally explore under the skin, like Superman, that would be super cool. You can even call it Krypton mode … In the same way you scale the model with the two controllers, you could open up a surface of the model to peer in behind it by controlling a ‘soft-surfaced’ sphere or cube with adjustable diameter/diagonal, perhaps … ? Only the surfaces within the sphere/cube would be rendered in X-ray, so very local?
Or a circle at the end of a laser pointer as you suggest projected on the nearest visible surfaces which then defines an ellipsoid which you control its diameter with the joystick left-right and it’s depth ( ie transparency level) with push/pull….
Just played with it; it’s simple enough to make faces inside a given sphere invisible. The sphere is (for now) a constant size at the end of the Tape Measure laser, when Tape Measure is set in a 5th new mode. The result is quite funny, and also possibly useful! We might actually want to add it even though it feels “not serious”
I think you’re quite enjoying yourself now
Sounds intriguing.
Hello! Thanks for the latest update with logic shadows. I also note that you introduced profiles since the latest update that I had installed on my Q3- makes a huge difference- thank you
Regarding profiles, would it be possible to change the default thickness, d’you think? JJ many instances it would only be required for subtle highlights of an object, such as furniture items with rounded surfaces. Having the ability to adjust that globally (or even by tag or group!?, although that may be pushing it) would be great
Also on a slightly different topic, some objects have a large number of edges in the same plane that cannot be avoided and depending on how the object is structured, they are rendered with the same line thickness. Trouble is that when you move away from such objects, the number of lines remains the same and so does the line thickness, which introduces the risk of the object being rendered as one big black entity when over a certain distance away from it. Like the slats on wooden table top for instance. Is there anything that could be done to minimise that effect? I realise that this may be quite an task but it would considerably improve the consistency of a render.
Many thanks for listening, as usual
Best, Sabin
Hi! Thanks for the comments.
Profile thickness could be adjusted to be thinner (but not thicker, or more precisely, thicker would be more complicated). I’ll try to play with it, and if it works we could make it into a global parameter. (Note: the thickness of both regular and profile-thick lines actually depends on the resolution, so a very high-res headset displays lines thinner than, say, a Quest 2…)
About large number of edges crowding the group to almost-completely-black: in the faster variant of drawing edges called “on face”, this effect is mostly avoided. The default variant is “standalone edges”, because “on face” is also less precise, in the sense that some edges may occasionally be irregular and partly too thin. Maybe we could have a combined mode, like “standalone for the top-level or currently opened group, and on-face for all the rest”…? Try to play with “on face” to see what I mean.
Thanks for getting back!
My personal issue with the profile lines was that they appeared to thick in places where they would have been required to just subtly highlight a feature, such as a rounded sofa, a cushion or a lampshade. So the ability to adjust them as you suggest would be most welcome in most situations
I had tried the on face mode but I found that, while it resolves the problem in some instances, it removes a lot of lines in areas where they are needed in order to reduce the overal number of objects, such as window mullions (I would prefer them to be drawn with a single line rather than have them represented by a 3D object)… difficult to explain. Of course, also depends on how one structures the model or how the lines within a component are grouped but sometimes there just isn’t enough time to tinker with other people’s components, trees or furniture items in particular … An in-between mode such as the one you suggest could well be the answer.
Thanks again for all your ongoing effort to improve your app. It is very reassuring.
OK, yes, I see the limitations of the “on face” mode and it may not be perfect for this use case. It was really meant to be used if you need a little bit more performance… In the standard “standalone edges” mode, the edges are really 2D lines, not 3D objects, in the sense that they are drawn just like you would draw a line on a screen, but between two screen coordinates that happen to be at the right position, giving you the 3D feeling. The resolution is typically lower than on a screen, and so all the lines are thicker. That’s the reason for why a bunch of lines on a far-away object ends up with too many pixels black… Switching all non-top-level edges to the “on face” mode might not be the solution either—it’s common to have models where all the geometry is in some subgroup. But maybe we can think about some other way…
A PC-only solution to try could be to draw lines smaller than one pixel wide—this should work because the PC graphic card is actually drawing four subpixels for each pixels, and averaging them out (using some clever optimization that makes it much less than 4 times slower). This avoids a lot of the “aliasing” effect that occurs otherwise and is the main reason for why the image looks a bit more jagged on the standalone Quest. So we could try to draw the lines inside the subpixels manually, half-a-pixel wide, and thus get the lines theoretically thinner than one pixel. I need to check the result and the performance.
Thank you. Unfortunately I’m on Macs but even there if I group together all the lines drawn on top of a shape rather than letting them subdivide that shape, the lines will shop up thick. So while that may do the trick visually, it would remove my ability to them extract individual area measurements of the areas that these lines would have otherwise created… and I do that a lot on my floor plans for instance. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, whatever you can do, it can only make things better Many thanks again
Maybe an option per component, in the list of components, where we can choose to hide edges in that specific component? Hide either all of them or the non-profile edges only?
Well, that would most likely work because we’re only talking about relatively few cases. Plus added control. So yes, that would work well enough for me and it’s a neat way of doing it. Thank you so much!
Hello again. I had a go at logic shadows and they don’t seem to work. I tried exporting the model from both SU 2024 and 2025 in both cases using the latest VR sketch extension and also downloaded the latest version of the app on my quest 3. Not sure what I am ding wrong - in the app I still get the little yellow warning triangle saying that the model needs to be updated using the latest VR Sketch update. Thanks
Can you confirm the version you have on the computer? The sketchup extension warehouse was very slow to acknowledge our request to update it, and it only updated to 27.0.0 a few days ago. (Check the “About” command in the menu in case of doubt.) If you are uploading the model with 27.0.0 and it still doesn’t work, then, oops? I’ll need to double-check.