Disappointingly, Style Builder is unchanged and the new editing capabilities in LayOut 3, such as support for precision moving, angular dimensions and customisable dashed line styles, fall into the tweaks category. SketchUp Pro also includes two important support applications for handling presentation: Style Builder, where you control the hand-drawn styles that helped give the program its name and LayOut, where you can place, orientate and annotate your models to produce advanced 2D plans and drawings. It’s also worth pointing out that users of the free version can achieve the same results if they can to get to grips with the existing Intersect with Model command. Such subtractive and additive modelling can certainly make life easier, but SketchUp’s system only works with groups and components with no holes and no overlaps. You don’t need thousands of bells and whistles to draw in 3D. Bring your 3D design online, and have your SketchUp projects with you wherever you go. NPR Styles can make your models appear hand-rendered, super-technical, and everything in between. You can use Style Builder to create custom non-photorealistic (NPR) Styles for SketchUp. SketchUp Free is the simplest free 3D modeling software on the web no strings attached. Styles are collections of display settings, including new options like Watermarks and Sketchy Effects, saved in the new Styles palette. Pro takes further advantage of the program’s volumetric handling to offer five new tools – Union, Intersect, Subtract, Trim and Split – for creatively combining solid objects. Access the essential SketchUp right in a browser. Support has been further extended in this latest release to include the popular DWG/DXF 2010 format. The main advantage of the commercial release is that it goes beyond bitmap and KMZ/DAE output to offer a much wider range of 2D and 3D export options such as EPS, PDF, 3DS, OBJ and FBX. That’s about it for the free Google SketchUp, but users wanting more power can turn to Google SketchUp 8 Pro (US$495).

Sketchup line styles