Hello everyone!
VR Sketch version 21 has been released!
The main reason for this release is compatibility: it runs with the brand new Sketchup 2024. A couple of fixes were needed. This is not really specific to VR Sketch: a number of extensions don’t work out of the box with Sketchup 2024. This is caused by common incompatibilities in the new Ruby version that is integrated in Sketchup 2024.
Other items on the what’s new list:
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some users report an issue with VR Sketch 19 and 20 not starting on PC, whereas VR Sketch 18 and earlier started correctly. At this point, we can’t reproduce the problem. However, the version of Unity was upgraded in VR Sketch 19. So we reverted and built VR Sketch 21 with the same Unity version as we did VR Sketch 18. If you were having troubles with VR Sketch 19/20, please try out VR Sketch 21 again.
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auto-rally option: this extends the “rally” option recently introduced in collaborative viewing or editing mode. Now, if a person enables “auto” next to “rally” in the Teleport tool context menu, then whenever that person teleports to a new location, everybody else follows him automatically.
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improved the visibility of selected edges—the blue edges were drawn with inconsistent visibility. They were sometimes almost invisible (not always).
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on Quest, if you deny the “audio recording” capability, VR Sketch used to crash. Fixed.
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you can now lock the position of the model to a specific position in the real world (see the Teleport tool context menu). This is useful in passthrough mode (“mixed reality”). It only works across one session: you need to position the model in the real world again if you close VR Sketch or open a different model. This is meant to be used with the Quest 3’s high(er)-quality passthrough. Note that the precision we get with the Quest 3 is limited to 1-3cm.
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Sketchup scenes can be set to not change the camera location; this is now correctly handled by VR Sketch. Such scenes are still useful with VR Sketch if they show or hide some layers, for example.
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as usual, there were a number of small bug fixes and performance improvements.
This release was forced by the Sketchup 2024 incompatibility issue, so there are a few other things we are working on that are not ready yet (and not included). I will talk about them in a different post.
Enjoy,
Armin Rigo