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 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.
Carrara 8 is DAZ Studio's official 'big sister' software.
Carrara loads all DAZ and Poser characters and scenes,
and supports LuxRender for top-quality realistic rendering.