[必看]：SketchUp 5最新消息

wkai

form : http://sketchup.com/?title=SketchUp%205

News Flash!

SketchUp 5 is just weeks away and our office is buzzing with pre-launch excitement. Our faithful Beta team is doing an amazing job testing the new features, and the quality assurance and development folks are working feverishly to address outstanding issues and put the finishing touches on our newest release. In case you missed it, we're pretty excited about this release and can't wait to get it into our customers hands!

If you are new to SketchUp and thinking about joining the craze, we invite you to purchase SketchUp today and receive a FREE upgrade to SketchUp 5 (see Purchase Protection below). If you are a current SketchUp user, you will receive an email announcement from us as soon as it's released!

Feature Overview:

SketchUp Gets a Facelift
Yep, and we did it without the expense or invasive surgery. New toolbars & icons (see sidebar) give SketchUp a whole new look, without sacrificing any of its intuitiveness or simplicity.

The new "Snappy Dialogs" are awfully handy. We've taught all the little settings panels to stick together. There are new ways to manage keyboard shortcuts, and the list of tools and operations that can have shortcuts assigned has been expanded.

For folks who are new to SketchUp, the new Getting Started application includes self-paced tutorials and some links to key areas on our website. There are also terrific enhancements to our online User's Guide including a concepts section, a glossary, and visual cues letting users know when a companion video tutorial is available on the same topic.

Cool New Tools
Wait until you see what we're calling "The Sandbox". It's a new set of tools for modeling terrain and other organic shapes. When you come to play in our backyard you can:

Bring in your survey data and create a surface from contours
Draw a surface from Scratch
Build berms and hills with our new SmooveTM Tool (it's a "smooth mover")
Put roads, building pads, parking lots, etc. in your model with the Stamp Tool
Project 2D geometry onto any complex 3D surface with the new Drape Tool
Use the Add Detail Tool to add resolution to any surface
The Flip Edge Tool lets you "flip" the interior edge between any two connected triangles to change a ridge to a valley (or visa versa)
Because SketchUp is all about simple yet sophisticated tools, we've made a few key improvements to our existing toolset that give you even more modeling power. You'll want to explore the new capabilities of the Rotate, Walk, Push/Pull, Circle and Polygon Tools.

Non-photorealistic Rendering
SketchUp is great for creating those sketchy, loose, and tentative models needed at the front-end of your design process, and they should look sketchy as well. We've expanded on the simple sketch rendering capabilities in SketchUp by adding:
Depth Cued Edges - make lines in the foreground of your model darker than lines in the background, adding that spatial "pop" to your work that you used to do by hand.
Endpoints - emphasize the endpoints of a line to highlight the corners of an object.
Edges Off - turn edges off, independent from profiles.
Transparency Maps - full support for placed image objects and texture maps with transparency.
Component Improvements
With SketchUp 5, we've added a bunch of new tools to help you organize and manage your model, making it much easier to use components to their fullest advantage.

The Outliner gives you an entirely new view of your model, exposing complex group and component hierarchies in an easy-to-use outline view.
Replace Selected allows you to swap in new components, or to modify a general design and make it more detailed on the fly.
To prevent inadvertent editing operations, you can now lock SketchUp Groups and Components.
Select All Instances lets you select all in-model instances of a specific component, making it easier to replace them all at once.
FaceMe Shadows gives you shadows cast as if the object were facing the sun, no matter what view you're in. This makes the shadows much more realistic.
And, there's a ton more! Be sure to check out the many possibilities of the new Component Creation User Interface, the Make Unique option and Highlight Component Selection.

Import & Export
We've always worked hard to ensure that SketchUp "works and plays well with others". In SketchUp 5, we've significantly improved our 3D model exports, and added some new ones to the mix as well.

Our DWG/DXF Import & Export has received a complete revision on both platforms. Using the latest DWG direct libraries, you get access to more DWG/DXF entities for a smoother translation into and out of SketchUp.

After DWG/DXF, our 3DS exporter is probably the most important to our users. As such, we have significantly improved its behavior. Enhancements include:
Large meshes greater than 65K vertices or faces are split into multiple meshes.
Smoothing is now supported.
The "welding of vertices" is now supported.
We hear that OBJ is as important to most folks as 3DS for general data transfer, and so we've given our OBJ Export full "first-class-citizenship" in SketchUp 5.

With our FBX Export (Filmbox), you can easily get your SketchUp models into the graphics pipeline for previz and special effects planning work, working easily with Alias' Motionbuilder and other applications.

Softimage|XSI is one of the 900lb gorillas in the entertainment industry, and we're proud to say that SketchUp now has an XSI Export.

Our VRML Export has been fully revised too! Among other things, it now supports texture maps on export, especially for "tweaked" textures.

To round out the terrain modeling capabilities of the Sandbox Tools, we added in a DEM Import that lets you work from digital terrain models and point-cloud surveys.

And, last but certainly not least, we've added a 3DS Import. When we asked for advice on picking the next export format, you overwhelmingly asked for a 3DS import instead. We listened, and here it is.

Ruby Scripting
Ruby has been a huge hit! And some of our current users write some amazing code! We've been listening to your requests, and have tried to add a couple of your biggest to SketchUp 5. There's more to talk about in the Ruby Documentation (which has been rewritten completely), but two highlights are Ruby Intellectual Property Protection and Ruby Toolbars.

Performance and Stability
SketchUp is now up to 2x faster on many modeling operations. Data files are kept in good working order with the new Check Validity feature, and Save as Previous Version allows compatibility with users of older versions.


Purchase Protection:
The official release of SketchUp 5 is scheduled for mid-Summer 2005. Customers who purchase a new license of SketchUp 4.0, or an upgrade to 4.0 between May 1, 2005 and the release of SketchUp 5 will receive a free upgrade to the new release. The free upgrade must be redeemed by April 30, 2006. Click here to purchase SketchUp today! (We'll send you an email notification after the release with upgrade instructions).