VR Sketch 25.0

#1

Hello everyone!

VR Sketch version 25.0 has been released.

What is new in this version:

  • support for “PBR” materials, also called “photoreal” materials, which were introduced in SketchUp 2025. These are more detailed material properties that improve the realism to a degree, like normal maps, metallicity, and so on. These properties are now also respected inside VR. Please note that:

    1. the “Light quality” needs to be set to high in the “Rendering” settings page; this should be the default. The lower light quality mode uses a simplified light computation logic which cannot easily be adapted to show the new material properties.

    2. the position of the texture might be off in VR if the material contains no regular texture, but still contains normal maps and/or other PBR textures. We are not sure yet if it is possible to fix this with the current SketchUp API. It is probably related to the SketchUp 2025 bug that hides “Texture -> Position” in the context menu for such a material. As far as we know, you can’t adjust the position in this case, even though you can if you set any regular texture—even a fully white image—on the material.

    3. so far, you cannot edit the new material properties from the VR Sketch interface. You can only change a material’s base color and texture in VR Sketch, but you cannot change the normal map, metallicity, roughness or occlusion in VR. You need to do that in SketchUp. (In particular, you cannot set the new properties in the standalone Quest’s “local file editing” mode.)

    4. for technical reasons, if the material is partly transparent, its “occlusion” texture is ignored. You may also get slightly different results if the “occlusion”, “metallicity” or “roughness” textures are not grayshade images (this is caused by a bug in SketchUp that may be fixed in the future). Other than these cases, we tried to give a visual result approaching SketchUp’s as closely as possible. Please report cases where a material gives really different results in VR Sketch!

  • bug fix about textures: if you send your model from a recent SketchUp (at least 2024, or maybe 2023) to a different machine or device, then some textures used to show up with an extremely low quality in VR. We implemented a workaround. The original issue comes from SketchUp.

  • all Internet connections to our central servers—to help with a connection to a Quest, or when viewing cloud models or collaboratively editing a model—have been overhauled. They should now be better at keeping the machines connected even when your local Internet connection is unreliable. If this is the case for you, make sure to update VR Sketch on all PCs, Mac’s and Quest/Pico devices at your place. You then get the benefits even when joining a collaborative editing session with other people using older versions of VR Sketch. Please note that any change at this technical level needs to be done carefully; report any new issue you have!

  • you can set in VR a new “no teleport” flag on specific materials, from the page that lists all materials as spheres. This prevents the teleporter from activating when you point the beam to a face with such a material on it. It can be used as a quick way to prevent, say, users from accidentally teleporting to the top of a table.

  • new feature in the “move freehand” tool (and also in the “move” tool since the previous release): you can rotate (or scale, in the “move” tool case) the object you are currently moving, by using the other controller and clicking on the object.

  • fixed a bug in the “move freehand” tool: if you make several copies, then the additional copies were accidentally added at a wrong position.

  • colored edges support. If, in SketchUp, you go in the Style tray, Edit, Color, and pick “By material”, then SketchUp draws edges using their material’s color instead of being all black. Now VR Sketch does the same. (Like other similar options, by default VR Sketch follows the setting chosen in SketchUp, but it can be overridden in the Rendering page in the settings.) When this mode is enabled and you select some edges in VR (with the “select” tool), then the “paint bucket” tool can be used to change the material of the selected edges. This mode requires the default “standalone” edge drawing mode; the faster “on face” edge drawing mode always draws the edges of faces in black. Also, there is a technical limit of around 250 different materials (applied to edges) in the model.

  • a new option (in the settings dialog box) lets you hide tool tips on controllers, if you find them more distracting than useful. You can also choose which controllers are displayed in VR when running on PC with SteamVR; this is mostly useful if you try out non-officially-supported controllers.

  • support some of the non-standard dynamic component functions added by 3dshouse.com.

Enjoy! —Armin Rigo

#2

Released VR Sketch 25.0.1 on the Quest. It contains a fix for the “save as a local file” command: when the model you send from SketchUp contains “image” objects, then the saved local file was created in an invalid state. Sorry about that! You will have to save the SketchUp model as a local file again with this new version before it works.

#3

Released VR Sketch 25.0.2. The difference is only for SteamVR (i.e. PC VR using non-Oculus, non-Meta headsets). We fixed an issue that was accidentally present since release 23 and which prevented VR Sketch from starting, at least in some configurations. Get it from our download page.

Our thanks go to the person that reported this issue to us. Please note that the only difference is that we added a missing file into the .rbz; in particular, that version is internally still called “25.0.0”.

Also, release 26 will come out soon, stay tuned!

#4

I’ve been refreshing the forums 5 times daily for a week now and still no release 26, which im very excited about. Are we talking days or weeks?

#5

Hi Adrian,

Days :slight_smile: We’re planning to release latest Monday morning. We’re also going to put up the current version as a beta (there are many changes so likely we missed something that broke) here in the forum, one or two hours from now.

#6

Preview of release 26:

Preview of the update information:

Click here to expand

  • SteamVR: fix a problem that prevented VR Sketch versions 23.x to 25.0.1 from correctly starting,
    at least in some configurations. Thanks a lot to the person that reported the problem and
    included the log file! This was very helpful for us. (The fix is actually why we did the
    recent bugfix release 25.0.2 but it’s worth mentioning it here again.)

  • a new “sculpt” tool lets you deform faces and lines. It is a replacement for the “smoove”
    tool of SketchUp, which was also experimentally present in the past few releases of VR Sketch.
    It is now a separate tool (above “extrude”). The main point of this new “sculpt” tool is that
    you don’t need to subdivide faces manually first: you apply a continuous deformation and the
    edges and faces get split into as many triangles as needed. You can deform in any direction.
    Use the thumbstick on the controller to change the diameter of the effect.
    By default, the new internal edges are created “smooth” and “soft”, in SketchUp terminology,
    so the surface appears smooth-ish. The density of new small triangles can also be configured.

  • materials editing: the user interface was modified. All material settings are now in a single window.
    New settings “roughness” and “metallicity” have been added (only numbers, not textures). These can be used in VR
    with any version of SketchUp, but with SketchUp 2025 they correspond to settings in PBR materials.
    (Note that we do support already the full range of SketchUp 2025’s PBR textures and normal/occlusion maps,
    but other than these two numbers, they must still be set outside VR.)

  • when multiple people view or edit the same model, everybody can now configure his own avatar: in addition to
    the player name displayed on the headset, the avatar’s color can be changed, and a few models are available
    besides VR Sketch’s default “capsule” (pill-shaped) body. See the Collaborators settings page.
    (If some people in a group are running an older, pre-26 version of VR Sketch, these people will still see
    all avatars as capsules.)

  • edge options: there are many more options to change the display of edges, available in a new sub-page of the
    Rendering settings page. Notably, you can view soft and hidden edges as dashed lines (like SketchUp’s
    “hidden geometry” option); you can have edges visible through other geometry but only up to some maximum
    distance (very useful in large models); and you can have edges that are part of the profile be drawn in
    bold (again like SketchUp, but this is off by default in VR Sketch because it might cost performance—and also
    there are cases in VR where the edges are part of the profile from one eye’s point of view and not the other,
    which might occsionally look unexpected in binocular vision).

  • shadow and fog settings are now saved scene-by-scene in cloud models. Previously, this would only work (*)
    when connected to SketchUp, because SketchUp itself would potentially change the shadow and fog settings
    when we clicked on a scene, and these new settings were then sent to VR Sketch automatically. (The (*) above
    is because there were related issues that made it not work in all cases even when connected in SketchUp;
    these have been fixed, hopefully.)

  • the teleport beam is more visible in front of very bright surfaces.
    We also added a slight 3D look instead of being a flat color.

  • in the settings dialog box, you can now pick out individually which tools you want to disable. This can be
    useful when showing VR Sketch to somebody else.

  • multiple collaborator mode: you can now disable editing for all other people or for specific people. The editing
    tools are automatically disabled for these people. Note that everybody needs to run VR Sketch 26 or later for this to
    work correctly. Also, please note that this does not offer a strong guarantee: anybody can go in the settings
    and re-enable editing for himself or anybody else. The idea is to prevent accidental changes.

  • a new Rendering setting sets the contrast level of the default texture used when there is no texture from SketchUp.
    We have been using our own, low-contrast texture instead of none at all because we found out that it gives a better
    visual depth hint in many models. The new setting can be set to zero if you really want a perfectly uniform color;
    conversely, it can be increased to larger values to accentuate the effect, which helps in some models (for example,
    it helps in unusual spaces to get a sense of how high the ceiling really is).

  • the settings pages have been reorganized, more clearly splitting general option pages from the pages that
    are really information about the current model. This also made it easier for us to add more pages about
    the current model: we added the “entity info” page, replacing the separate “entity info” window; and we
    added a new “outliner” page, which like in SketchUp lets you see and change the hierarchy of nested groups
    and components.

  • PC only: the ambient occlusion effect (small shadows near the corners) can now be configured higher than before.
    (The effect is still not available on standalone headsets because it is relatively expensive to compute.)

  • standalone Quest/Pico only: fixed a bug when saving a SketchUp model as a local file. If that model contains
    an “image” object, the resulting local file was broken.

#7

Had trouble installing the apk due to additional software required, so decided to wait for full release, which I’m very excited for!

#8

We’ve been fighting with the Sketchup Ruby API to reliably subdivide a face into many smaller triangles, but I think we managed now (by sending the subdividing edges in just the right order, otherwise Sketchup ends up making some small triangles that occupy the same space as a bigger triangle). Tomorrow, I hope.

#9

Done, I’ll update the links and make the proper post in the forum in a day or so. Grab the rbz here. The Meta store should have the update already.

#10

Thank you! tons of really great improvements as always!

The new smoove tool:

  • Even though radius is limited, it seems to have infinite range “backwards”, so editing a single surface up/down works great, but for a more complex shape or operation (eg to drag a a hill sideways) it will affect a huge area behind which is uninuitive and maybe unintended. If possible, maybe the radius should also be applied in every direction, so you influence a sphere instead of an infinite cylinder?

  • VR sketch crashes quite a bit when using the new smoove tool, not sure why. It seems to crash randomly, maybe more often when subdivide is on (but not sure about this).

  • Move tool, added controls: When moving i can rotate and scale with the other hand, which is genius. But with the “glove” tool I can only rotate using off hand (which i could already do) but not scale, which would be great. Maybe add scale with left hand, or replace rotation with scale?

  • While smoove tool is awesome for tweaking terrain or lines, I really like the glove tool as it allows me to also freely rotate whatever surface/line I have grabbed, which smoove tool doesn’t let me do, and I have very good control (since the object i grabbed follows my hand movement 100%). Having a soft selection option for the glove tool would be really great, so that everything around is also dragged/moved/rotated in the same direction, even if it only applied to the closest lines/faces. But I assume it’s much harder to implement than it sounds.

The glove tool is still by far my favourite tool as it lets me do so much that can’t be done wihtout VR - especially placing objects around, with Z axis open or locked.

Another idea: Making selections in general is a bit tricky since the 3D box depends on axis, which are usually not intuitive/known to the user. I seldom get selections right on the first try, except when selectin individual objects. (eg if I want to few 5-6 trees at once). The erase note tool you invented is genius since it uses gestures to control size, if the same principle could be use for selection objects/faces then it would give a lot more control.