Today John Bacus of Google gave me a private viewing of the new SketchUp Pro 6, demonstrating its key new features. What distinguishes the Pro version is the new LayOut application that is integrated into it. Integration is the keyword here too because LayOut is not, John tells me, available as a separate application. Technically it actually is an application that runs in its own "thread" and John tells me there are several reasons for that.

More LayOut

Some details about LayOut that may not be gathered easily from the SketchUp website include the fact that LayOut is not just a supplemental application but one that works equally well in a multi-user network situation. This means for instance that you can have one user -- or many users -- creating models using SketchUp Pro 6 while another user runs LayOut and is doing just that, laying out "linked" model data. LayOut does not include a dimensioning feature however, just notes and other drawing capabilities. So dimensions must be done in SketchUp itself.

Another interesting aspect about LayOut is that its model views (similar to viewports in CAD/BIM apps) can be edited at the viewport edge and background level. There are many nice effects you can achieve because of this. The application also seems to be utilizing Apple's Quartz Extreme as LayOut views are never simplified when you zoom or pan around.

Objects in LayOut have direct manipulation with very intelligent and very simple auto-snapping. Your cursor does not have to touch a particular vertex in order to auto-inference to that vertex Object edges just snap easily to other edges and corners and mid points.

Printing happens in LayOut by way of Mac OS X's built-in print architecture. Everything is rasterized (model wise).

Not Photogrammetry

SketchUp 6 not a full-featured photogrammetry program, despite the obvious facts of how it works. There are plenty of those in the market and Google's interest lies in providing a very simple way for users to create photo-textured models for Google Earth via the 3D Warehouse. Speaking of which, Google Earth is now showing not a few but many fully textured models that have been built using the new Photo Matching capabilities of SketchUp 6. The company has done several buildings itself.

Other Notes

SketchUp Pro 6's new styles are handled in a new palette that centralizes their creation and management. The styles themselves are actually OpenGL-based textures applied to the model's edges, and the program utilizes new techniques for NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) that have been widely discussed and disseminated at SIGGRAPH over the past few years. John Bacus thought that SketchUp Pro 6 may be the first program on the market that utilizes these new NPR techniques that know how to "generalize" model data and its texture-map presentation so as the model gets farther away from the observer, and thus smaller, key information is actually dropped out of the picture.

Lastly, with the styles infrastructure in SketchUp Pro 6 (which is XML-based) users may be able to create their own styles in the future.