VR Sketch 20.0

#1

Hello,

VR Sketch version 20 is now available!

What’s new since version 19:

  • Rhino: our beta Rhino plugin, which works on Rhino 7 and 8 as well as on PC or Mac, was updated to support VR Sketch 20 with a number of fixes. This includes live updates from Rhino to VR, and showing the correct layers only—the ones that are visible in Rhino too. If needed, be sure to update both this plugin and the version on your standalone Quest/PicoNeo to version 20. As usual, the (lightly tested) Mac version only supports standalone headsets.

  • a major editing bug was fixed. Since version 18, in some cases, editing a model would consume more and more GPU memory. After maybe 15 minutes, it would start pausing and/or glitching; you needed to restart VR Sketch. This bug has now been identified and fixed.

  • Room depth: this is a new Quest 3 passthrough option. It uses the approximative room depth as scanned by the Quest 3. This gives the most natural passthrough way yet (but of course only works on Quest 3): parts of your model that are behind the real room walls become almost hidden. They are still just visible, but the room shows up in front of them, as if your real walls were slightly transparent and you’d see the virtual model through them. How to activate passthrough: go to Settings, Rendering page, scroll down until you reach the options for Passthrough.

  • new Sketchup menu command: initial VR position. It sets your model’s initial VR position, and optionally the orientation, to some place in the model instead of in the warehouse. Like before, you can also teleport an existing VR player by using the VR Sketch tool of Sketchup (selected by default when you activate VR); the option to set the orientation was also added to that tool.

  • the point clouds in VR would always be recentered around the origin. This was not intended and has been fixed. There is an option when you send the point cloud to force the old behavior, for compatibility with your existing work. If you are using collaborative editing (and don’t check that option), everybody needs VR Sketch 20, otherwise some will see the point cloud wrongly recentered while others will see it at its intended position.

  • in some cases, the green box of a group selection would “z-fight” with the faces of that group (you’d see a color that changes all the time between the face’s color and the green of the box).

  • going to a scene in Sketchup would give an error in VR Sketch, instead of teleporting the VR user to that position too.

  • reduced the delay and amount of data sent between Sketchup and VR Sketch in some cases, notably sometimes when you close a group.

…and a number of smaller bug fixes, as usual. Send us any bug you see, this kind of feedback is always welcome!

Enjoy the new release,
Armin Rigo

3 Likes
Rhino viewer (pre-alpha)
#2

The " initial VR position feature has improved significantly my work with the software! thanks!
A small (but big haha) request: please it would be so useful to continue to dive into the interactive part (drag), when i use it the people goes crazy and love it!

#3

You are talking about the “Interact” tool (both in Sketchup and in VR Sketch), with components that move or turn, right? Expanding it beyond the current state is not really our focus, but if you have some ideas about things you’d like to see, feel free to share them, and we will consider them!

1 Like
#4

Its amazing to have the chance to speak these issues and ideas here with you!

Iwill tell you my specific case, just in terms of share it with you and see the ways we use your product :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: i design work spaces, structures, crafting tables, for the industrial sector. And i use VR sketch so that the clients can see these pieces of furniture (more similar to structures) and “test” them in real scale, they can test the workspace, the distances, the heights of the shelfs, ecc. I have introduced the posibility to open cabinets, or move boxes from one side to the other, this part of the “game” of testing the structure is the part that they enjoy the most. Indeed, when i put them in front of the design, the first question is “and can i take this box with me?” haha they are litteraly urged to interact with it. And the options work beautifully but i feel then a bit limitated, i understand that maybe its not the main goal as for architecture and ecc works fine to just open doors or cabinets.

I should clarify that i ussually use the cloud visualization, as the part of "move"tool ecc available in the version using the pc its sometimes difficult for some people (tough i feel it super easy,but im 30 not 60 haha). Anyway, im looking forward to keep working with this amazing app that you have developed! and thanks for this space to express us

#5

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback! It is an interesting use case indeed. To “take the box with me”, you can use the “freehand move” tool, which even has got the option to “drop” a group until it falls on something else (the table, or the floor). However, it doesn’t work with cloud models, and also it’s some other tool somewhere else. Maybe we can think about a design where, with the same “interact” tool, we could pick up and move any group, unconstrained—the difference being that the move is not recorded back in Sketchup, and so it would work just as well in cloud models. Just an idea.

#6

…or maybe more in-line with the current approach: you would still need to mark in advance specific components as “dynamic components”, but instead of choosing e.g. which axis it moves along and which distance, you’d pick a generic option like “can be moved freely”, “can be thrown and falls with gravity”, or “to be moved horizontally only” for bigger objects like tables, for example. This would be done in advance, before the model is uploaded as a cloud model. Another advantage of doing it this way, besides the finer-grained control of options, is that when we just click on some random group, VR Sketch doesn’t know a priori the “level” that the user means—the top-level group, or the innermost nested group, or something intermediate. Also, you could have the table be a group (or component) labelled “moves horizontally”, and small items on the table labelled “moves with gravity”, in which case VR Sketch could detect that the small items are resting on top of the table and move the small items together with the table…

1 Like
#7

Asolutely! The suggestions you are mentioning on the second post would be amazing! at the present the part of configurate and preset each of the components i want to move is already being implemented, as adding the onclick attributes or stuff, and so for other sketchup duties i do in my work. It would be interesting to know as well if any other user is using this kind of implementations ! I have the quest 2 but planning on buying the quest 3 to explore the aumented reality. Thanks again!