Sad news from Trimble, who took over SketchUp and Google 3D Warehouse from Google. They’re now making the SketchUp software subscription-only. It will reportedly…
stop sales of new perpetual licences after 4 November 2020, along with renewals of maintenance contracts for existing perpetual licences, moving to a subscription-only model.
I suppose we should be grateful that there will still (for now) be a ‘free’ lite version, introduced at the end of 2017, even though that is online-only. I’m not sure if that can back-convert older models though, as .SKPs are version-sensitive. For instance your older software (which ‘knows’ about .SKPs, such as Keyshot) may need its Warehouse 3D model .SKPs to be from SketchUp 8, or some other older version. That means the current Warehouse 3D downloads need to be tediously back-converted by running them through the current version of SketchUp.
They’re also keeping 3D Warehouse online for now, albeit slowly making it ever more difficult to get in, curate, download from, or to get 3D models from that work with older versions of SketchUp or conversion software. Again, I suppose we should be thankful for that.
If you still want free on a desktop, then SketchUp Make in early 2017 was the last good free desktop version. Archive.org has the required installer… sketchupmake-2017-2-2555-90782-en-x64.exe.
But it’s no great loss as regards Poser and DAZ .OBJ geometry. As SketchUp is a total nightmare to import to and then to move something around in (that horrible ‘placer’ and then the bizarre ‘stick to the object’ mover… ugh). It is just not worth the hassle — if all you want is to get one of the Sketch Styles filtering a 3D view of an object or figure. Stick with Poser 11 and the real-time Comic Book lineart + Sketch.
However it is still useful for rendering items found in the Warehouse, with a Sketch Style, such as generic city buildings for the background of a comic or illustration.
