John Bacus, director of SketchUp product management at Trimble, discussed with AECCafe Voice the new SketchUp 2015.

SketchUp Pro 2015’s Rotated Rectangle Tool draws rectangles that don’t have to be perpendicular or parallel to a default axis.

1.  Do you see the IFC import as the most important addition to the new release, SketchUp 2015? And if so why?

IFC import has certainly captured the attention of many of our users in the construction industry, but SketchUp 2015 contains quite a few other important features as well. I like to think of SketchUp releases as offering a balance of new features, general improvements and core performance tuning. That said, with the addition of an IFC importer, SketchUp is now capable of participating in open building design and construction processes in some important new ways.

The IFC importer plays a key supporting role in a comprehensive new working style that we’ve been building into SketchUp for the last three releases— what I’ve been generally referring to as “information modeling.” The idea is that users should be able to work as quickly and efficiently with attributes and other non-graphical metadata on their models as they can with the model’s raw geometry. We want to extend the fast and loose sketching qualities of SketchUp beyond the ‘look’ of things and into their functional semantics.

Importing an MEP reference model in SketchUp Pro using Trimble Connect

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