Collaborative mode

#21

Hello, it has been some time :). I hope you are well. Congratulations on your ever-improving product! I love it.

I need some help please on a couple of fronts:

A. I need to be able to share a model with a client and store it locally on their headset:

  • they would be using my own two original meta quest headsets (the black model- I lend them to people until they decide to buy their own)
  • i already set up some free individual VR sketch accounts
  • both headsets are registered under the same meta username.
  • when I update a model, I would like to be able to send them another link to the revised model to upload and save locally on their headset, under their own VR sketch account.

Can this be done please?

I am aware that you can send a link to people but the model disappears as soon as they leave the app.

B. Outline rendering of round objects

Is there any way of replicating the sketch-up rendering effect of round objects, please, where a line is drawn that highlights the outline of an object? At the moment a white round object can completely disappear against a white wall if no direct light falls on it.

C. Dimension tool picking points in invisible layers

I may have brought this to your attention in the past… when I share a model with several layers, each containing a different design version for instance, when using the dimension tool, it snaps on points of the model in invisible layers.

D. Shadows in scenes

Is there a way of saving shadows in scenes? I realise that unless connected to a computer, the app cannot render shadows by season or time of the day. But what if some shadow settings were saved in SketchUp scenes?

It is very important for clients to have an accurate shadow simulation in their own time without being connected to a computer. For several reasons I cannot share my SketchUp models with my clients directly.

Many thanks!
Best wishes
Sabin

#22

Hi!

A. Sharing a model with another VR Sketch account: Something similar is possible but using an not-official-so-far solution. You can change which models appear in the “Demo” page for a given Meta Quest (or PicoNeo) headset, identified by its 6-digit Quest ID. This is probably the easiest way in your case: https://vrsketch.eu/set_demo_models.html. To use this page, you need to have uploaded your model or a new version of it to our cloud; copy and paste the URL of the form https://vrsketch.eu/m/xxxxxxxx into the big text box. Several such URLs can be specified. It’s per-headset, not per user account, so you need to repeat the procedure to set it up on two headsets. The Quests themselves will get the new list the next time VR Sketch is restarted on them.

B. Can you include a screenshot? It can be a screenshot of Sketchup, showing the effect you are describing and that isn’t really visible in VR Sketch.

C. Can you confirm that the problem still occur in the latest VR Sketch, version 25? I thought this was fixed, but it may not be.

D. It’s always possible to set the sun’s angle by pointing in the sky, but I realize that (1) it’s not a setting saved with the model and (2) you’d prefer to set it by date and time in the first place. I think that SketchUp supports saving and restoring the shadow settings in the scenes, and these settings should automatically be updated in VR Sketch when you’re connected to a computer. So the question is to add support for doing it with view-only cloud models. That should be relatively easy but we’ll check.

#23

Hi again,

About B., I think now that it’s because SketchUp has got two different edge-visibility modes: some edges might not be drawn in SketchUp except if they are part of the “profile” of the object. VR Sketch has no corresponding notion. It’s a bit more delicate to do that in VR, though, because in some cases an edge is part of the “profile” from one eye, but not from the other eye. Moreover, very small random movements of the head can make the profile edges jump. I could try to experiment and check if that’s still OK, though.

#24

Thanks Arigo! Just got your message. Reassuring to know that you are still around. The app is really great. I’ll get back you on Monday. Thanks again

#25

A. That is neat for now, thank you!
B. Noted
C. Only in 17.09 on my older headsets. 25 on my Quest 3 works a treat.
D. That would be a great start, at least until the headsets are powerful enough to generate their own shadows. Or is that still the issue with the latest models such as Q3?

#26

Feedback update:

A. This works flawlessly- you guys have thought of everything :). thank you.
D. Having just checked, the shadows settings are not remembered in VR Sketch. I was very careful to create scenes in Sketchup which only remember the time of the day and month, and anything else, such as camera location, layer visibility, style etc. Also, if I click on any such scenes in 17.09, I am teleported to the origin of the model. This does not happen in 25.

Thank you!

#27

Hi!

OK, there’s an issue with your use case: we no longer really support the Quest 1 headsets, in the sense that we stopped publishing updates since 17.0.9 at the beginning of 2023. It would be seriously more complicated for us than just making one extra build, because the Quest 1 hardware does not support the new, much faster display technique we introduced in version 18.

This explains some issues you have with 17.0.9 when used together with much more recent versions of VR Sketch. For example, scene support has been improved since version 17, so if you create and export scenes using SketchUp together with a recent version of the VR Sketch extension, but then load it in a Quest running 17.0.9, then things may not entirely work as expected.

Similarly, if we extend the scenes support in the future VR Sketch version 26 or 27, e.g. to add shadows, then in all likelihood the users would all need version 26 or 27 on their Quest for the shadows to work correctly—so it won’t work with Quest 1.

It’s also why some menus are different—some functionalities were added more recently, so of course their menu command was not present in 17.0.9.

Quest 1 is really unsupported at this point, not just by us but by Meta and the community around it… Please contact us at info@baroquesoftware.com if you are really stuck with these Quest 1 headsets and would like us to check if we could do something, and what amount of money it would take. But no promises: it depends if we have enough time to allocate to that.

#28

Oh well, I guess I will have to live with what I’ve got then and avoid saving shadows in my scenes. Thanks anyway.

#29

Quick question. If I were to register my quest 1 with meta with a new user account, would I still be able to install VR Sketch v 17.0.09 through Meta store?
Thanks
Sabin

#30

I think so. We try to make that work, but we have no guarantee that Meta itself doesn’t arbitrarily “break” it just because it wants to push people away from the Quest 1. If that’s the case, you should still be able to download and install the file manually (see “Installation without using the App Lab” in our documentation).