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