Hello everyone!
VR Sketch version 26.0 has been released.
There are quite some changes this time, and also a potentially important bug fix for people using SteamVR. In more details, here are the major changes:
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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.)
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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.
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materials editing: the user interface was modified. All material settings are now in a single window. New numeric settings “roughness” and “metallicity” have been added; these work in VR with any version of SketchUp, but if you are using SketchUp 2025 they match the 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.)
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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.)
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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 occasionally look unexpected in binocular vision). Note: still missing: support for the dashed line style you can set up in the “Tags” panel in recent versions of Sketchup.
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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 drawn with a flat color.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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PC only: the ambient occlusion effect (darkening near the corners of the model) can now be configured higher than before. (The effect is still not available on standalone headsets because it is relatively expensive to compute.)
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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.
Enjoy!
— Armin Rigo