VR Sketch 15.0 has been released with a large number of small features.
What’s new since version 14.0:
-
The continuous walking mode, for people who prefer that to teleporting. This comes with a warning about motion sickness. Also, when turning left or right by pressing the joystick, the angle can be configured (now 30° instead of 90° by default), and it includes a “continuous” option — definitely not for everybody! We recommend that you don’t use these two continuous options for long sessions! It’s fine to impress customers, but if you get a bit sick after half an hour, this can be the cause.
-
“Notes” can now be drawn in specific layers of the geometry; they are hidden when that layer is hidden. Also added an option to draw straight lines. These are options on the context menu of the “Notes” tool, as well as in the Settings, “Layers” page, where you pick which layer to draw notes into. (You can also make additional layers for the only purpose of containing notes.)
-
Feedback when loading model from the network: displays status and download speed, instead of just the progress bars.
-
Photo/video recording: added options for the resolution, frame rate, and compression. The default compression is now low, i.e. you get larger files but your CPU spends less time compressing it, lowering the risks of dropping frames.
-
In collaborative mode, a small sound is played when a new player joins.
-
In collaborative mode, if anyone opens another model with the same 9-digits code, everybody connected to the old model is now automatically sent to the new model. This gives a natural way to bring your group of people to a new model without having to ask each of them to close and re-open. (Previously they would be left behind in the old model, now disconnected; and if you wanted to come back and tell the slower guys “hey, we’re moving”, you found that you couldn’t do that anymore, precisely because the old SketchUp model is now disconnected.)
-
Freehand drawing: tweaked the snapping rules.
-
Tape measure: this tool has now got various submodes, allowing clearer and extra functionality. For example the first (default) mode is a laser to point to things and tell you how far away they are. This laser can conveniently be used when recording videos, in screenshots, or to show the person sitting on the PC, or in collaborative editing mode.
-
Collaborative editing or cloud viewing: on Quest, people can now enter their own name, which is visible on their headset from other people’s point of view. Previously their name was just displayed as “Quest #123456”. On PC we use the Windows login name (and this can’t be changed in the current approach: the dialog box to change it is specific to Quest).
-
Quest: if controllers are idle, your hands appear and would accidentally trigger unexpected teleports. It was always an option to turn off teleporting from your hands, but now the option is off by default because it causes a lot of confusion.
-
If you know the game engine Unity: there is now a way build a scene in Unity and use it with VR Sketch, as a sort of custom per-model warehouse instead of VR Sketch’s default one (but it moves around and scales with your model, too). The Unity scene can use light-mapping and some other precomputed or dynamic effects. It can be used to give a background of high quality inside which you edit your model, or even simply as a roundabout way of viewing (and walking in) a high quality scene. This should also work on the Quest and in cloud models and with collaborative editing (the custom scene is uploaded from SketchUp along with the rest of the model). Please ask on the VR Sketch forum for details.
Notable fixes:
-
Layers are now displayed in alphabetical order (with Layer0 at the top), like they are in SketchUp by default.
-
In collaborative mode, anyone can now list the materials not loaded yet, and use them (it’s the list of extra materials displayed in SketchUp under names like “Glass and Mirrors”).
-
Fixes to editing the texture position.
-
SketchUp 2021 introduced “live components”. Editing them is not supported; at least now you get a clear error message when trying to open them in VR Sketch.
-
Prevent the sun from going too far below the horizon, preventing the “uniformly black sky” effect if the time is set to the middle of the night. (Maybe we should instead display the correct pattern of stars…)
-
Due to a bug, the light would be reflected from the VR Sketch warehouse to your model even after the warehouse was hidden. This resulted in an unexpected yellow-ish tint, mostly visible on your model’s ceilings: the reason was that the floor of the (hidden) warehouse is made out of wood.
-
On some machines, double-clicking on a group to open it no longer worked. Sorry about that.
-
Multiple other workarounds in the Ruby logic for SketchUp.
Enjoy!