Trimble has built a new suite of collaboration tools directly into the heart of SketchUp for Desktop, alongside improvements to documentation, site context, and visualisation.

The latest release of the popular push/pull 3D modelling software introduces private sharing control, in-app commenting, and real-time viewing, allowing designers to collect feedback from clients and stakeholders without leaving the SketchUp environment.

“Great designs are shaped by conversation, iteration and shared insight,” said Sandra Winstead, senior director of product management, architecture and design at Trimble. “Rather than jumping between email threads or third-party tools to hold conversations, collaborate and make design decisions, we’ve built collaboration directly into SketchUp.”

With these new tools, designers can securely share models with selected stakeholders, controlling who can view and comment. Feedback is attached directly to 3D geometry, ensuring comments are linked to the right part of the model.

All collaborators see updates instantly, creating what Trimble describes as a shared space for real-time design conversations. Cursor and camera tracking features also allow clients and colleagues to follow along during live presentations.

Elsewhere, SketchUp now includes professional 2D drafting tools in LayOut, the companion application used for presentations and documentation.
According to Trimble, users gain access to more intuitive and precise drawing features for common documentation tasks, along with new scrapbooks offering standard architectural graphics such as doors and windows for scaled 2D composition.

An enhanced DWG export workflow helps ensure that SketchUp geometry and Tags are accurately preserved when transferring designs from 3D SketchUp into 2D CAD or BIM tools.

Trimble has also upgraded Scan Essentials, the SketchUp plug-in for turning point cloud data into 3D models. The latest release makes it easier to incorporate existing buildings into terrain as pre-built 3D geometry, supporting more accurate visualisation, climate analysis, and site planning.

SketchUp’s visualisation capabilities have been further refined, offering greater stylistic control and a broader set of rendering options, including Color Ambient Occlusion, Ambient Occlusion Scale Multiplier, and Invert Roughness.

Finally, for AI-assisted rendering, a new Diffusion Labs update delivers higher-fidelity imagery and greater creative control over AI-generated imagery.

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Esri has released ArcGIS for Autodesk Forma. a new integration that brings Esri’s geospatial reference data into Autodesk’s planning and design software, providing users with a single design environment without having to switch between platforms.

ArcGIS for Autodesk Forma will also streamline the sharing of designs enriched with GIS data from Autodesk Forma to Autodesk Revit.

“AECO professionals who use Autodesk Forma will now be able to quickly update projects with the most up-to-date GIS data available,” said Eric DesRoche, director of infrastructure business strategy at Autodesk. “With access to the most accurate and current geographic information during the conceptual design stage, users can design with location in mind and ultimately deliver projects that are more sustainable, resilient and can better support local communities.”

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ArcGIS for Autodesk Forma will serve as an Autodesk extension, incorporating geographic data and geospatial services to enable greater analytics and insights. According to Esri, it will give professionals a deeper, more holistic understanding of projects connected to the social, built, and natural worlds, and give direct access to maps, layers, and other spatial data.

Included are Esri’s ArcGIS basemaps and select data layers from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.

The combination of GIS and BIM during early design and planning stages will also bring teams advanced understanding and visualization of projects.

“Our augmented reality technology hinges on visualizations that function as counterparts to the physical world, so the seamless use of public and proprietary spatial data is critical for customers,” said Dana Chermesh-Reshef, inCitu founder and CEO. “ArcGIS for Autodesk Forma’s interface is easy to use and responsive, while accessing data is intuitive for AECO professionals with even limited to no GIS experience.”

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Cityweft, a new web-based platform aimed at architects, urban designers, property developers and municipal planners, has entered its closed launch phase, with a full public launch scheduled for 5 May.

The Cityweft platform enables users to create ‘high-quality’, customisable 3D models of cities and sites that can be used for early-stage design in CAD and BIM authoring tools such as SketchUp, Revit, Archicad and Rhino.

“Context modelling should be fast, accurate, and built for the way architects and AEC professionals actually work,” said Alexander Groth, co-founder, CEO, Cityweft.

Cityweft transforms disparate real-world datasets- such as 3D buildings, terrain, and infrastructure data – into ‘unified’ CAD-editable 3D geometry. Each mesh layer is generated separately for ‘easy customisation’.

Through the web-platform, users can find city models and data from around the world (e.g. OpenStreetMaps, Google Open Buildings, Microsoft ML Buildings and Esri Community Buildings), preview and customise directly on the platform, and then export to Rhino, SketchUp, GLTF, OBJ, STL and (soon) IFC, or connect via API.

According to the company, in contrast to other solutions that use simple extrusion geometry, Cityweft’s advanced geometry processing and proprietary algorithms produce complex and accurate geometry including close to 20 roof types. Higher quality building models not only aid design but can help deliver more reliable sunlight analysis in tools like Autodesk Forma.

Cityweft is based in Tallinn, Estonia. Users can request early access to the platform.

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Trimble SketchUp 2025 features better interoperability with Revit and IFC, and new visualisation capabilities, including photorealistic materials and environment lighting options.

To improve interoperability the 3D modelling software now includes more predictable IFC roundtrips, greater control over which Revit elements and 3D views are imported, and improved support for photorealistic materials when exporting USD and glTF file formats.

“The IFC import feature is incredible,” said Lucas Grolla, architect and owner of Grolla Arquitetura. “It has greatly improved the coordination of different project models with the architectural design. Plus, the new material editor and HDRI styles open up countless possibilities for the visual representation of projects.”

According to Trimble, the new visualisation features enable designers to apply photorealistic materials, turn on environment lighting and see how they interact in real time without hitting a ‘render’ button or waiting to see changes.

For enhanced environments, 360-degree HDRI or EXR image files now act as a light source, reflecting off photoreal materials. Meanwhile, dynamic materials are said to more accurately convey texture and represent how real-world materials absorb and reflect light, with a view to producing richer, more realistic visuals within SketchUp. Finally, the introduction of ambient occlusion adds visual emphasis to corners and edges, adding perceived depth and realism with or without having materials applied.

“Accessing high-quality, realistic materials directly within the platform has made it so much easier to quickly present designs that resonate with clients,” said Kate Hatherell, director of The Interior Designers Hub. “This feature is a game changer for accelerating workflows, and I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve.”

Elsewhere, LayOut, a tool for creating documents from SketchUp models, has been updated to provide a user experience more consistent with SketchUp. 3D Warehouse, a vast repository of 3D models, also now offers curated photoreal materials, environments and configurable 3D assets in the SketchUp content library.

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Snaptrude has built an Excel-like interface directly into its BIM authoring software, to make architectural programming simpler and allow architects to quickly generate data-backed design concepts with views, renders, and drawings.

With the new ‘Program’ mode every row, formula, and update is synced live with the 3D model, and vice versa. According to Snaptrude, this means architects don’t need to juggle separate spreadsheets, ensuring real-time accuracy and eliminating the need for manual cross-checking. Users can define custom formulas and rules to fit their specific building program needs.

‘Program’ mode works alongside Tables, which is billed as a new home for all kinds of structured information inside Snaptrude.

Tables includes an AI wizard, so users can ‘quickly generate’ or refine their program with an AI co-pilot.

“Over the last 18 months, we’ve started spending a lot of time with mid to large sized architectural firms across the US and globally as well. And one thing which we constantly kept hearing is Excel is everywhere, and it’s a huge part of everyone’s workflows, and it’s quite understandable,” said Altaf Ganihar, founder and CEO, Snaptrude.

“From programming to construction, everybody knows how to use it, it’s very easy to use, and everybody relies on it. So instead of fighting it, we said, let’s just embrace it, we built an Excel like interface directly into Snaptrude.”

Snaptrude Program mode is currently in early access.

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Zenerate has launched Zenerate App, an AI-powered design automation software designed to quickly generate and identify optimal design schemes, and eliminate the need to redraw floor plans to fit a unit mix.

With a few inputs, architects, developers and brokers can use the software’s AI engine to generate various building and site plan options in real-time that meet specific project objectives.

Users can optimise designs by maximizing floor area ratio or density, or specify a unit mix, as well as quickly test diverse massing, building layout and parking options (podium, structure, surface).

Designs can then be edited, by dragging and dropping residential units, stairs, elevators, retail/office space, drive aisles, parking stalls, etc.

The software can also be used to assess financials (net operating income (NOI), construction cost, project cost, yield on cost or residual value).

Finally, it can generate PDF reports, export data in Excel, or download floor plans in CAD or Revit to further develop the design.

Zenerate App is available for a free two-week trial.

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SketchUp for iPad can now take advantage of the iPad Pro’s LiDAR scanner to capture scans of buildings and transform the data it into ‘clean, organised 3D geometry’ as a starting point for conceptual design.

The new Scan-to-Design [Labs] feature uses a combination of Canvas scan technology, Apple RoomPlan technology and Trimble technology to capture interior and exterior spaces. Designers simply scan a room as if they were painting the walls, and choose whether to output textured 3D meshes that are created with Canvas scanning technology or create ‘simplified, untextured planes’ using Apple’s RoomPlan technology –or both.

Once the data has been captured designers can use SketchUp for iPad’s modelling tools to quickly visualize and iterate design options in 3D. For feedback, clients and other collaborators can use Apple Pencil to mark up the model. They can also immerse themselves in the design using augmented reality (AR).

For collaboration, designers can also use Trimble Connect to share designs in the cloud, allowing them to manage projects and teams and invite new collaborators to view 3D models using easy-to-share links.

“Designers want to capture complete as-built conditions quickly and easily without having to switch between multiple tools, and they need to share their conceptual designs with clients in a way that builds both excitement and trust,” said Mike Tadros, director of product management at Trimble.

“Scan-to-Design solves those needs by empowering designers to quickly capture a holistic view of a job site and provides a starting point for creating beautiful conceptual designs that can easily be shared with a client for immediate feedback.”

“Today’s designers are increasingly taxed with having to capture an enormous amount of detail, come up with beautiful designs that will ‘wow’ their clients, and communicate that in a way that easily facilitates feedback,” said Sumele Adelana, senior product marketing manager for Trimble SketchUp.

“Scan-to-Design drastically streamlines that workflow while also making it more visually appealing by enabling designers to easily capture, design, and collaborate – all in one app.”

Scan-to-Design is currently available as part of the SketchUp Labs Program, a public beta that allows SketchUp subscribers to try new features and provide feedback.

SketchUp for iPad review

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It’s available to view now, free, along with all our back issues.

Subscribe to the digital edition free + all the latest AEC technology news in your inbox, or take out a print subscription for $49 per year (free to UK AEC professionals).

The dawn of auto-drawings
Several CAD software firms are making real progress in drawing automation in the race to eliminate one of the AEC sector’s biggest bottlenecks.

Enscape: building performance analysis
Enscape is to get a new module, powered by IES technology, that gives instant visual feedback on building performance.

TestFit runs free
The Texas-based design automation software developer releases a free massing tool for architects.

NXT BLD / DEV 2024
AI, automation, digital fabrication, BIM 2.0, data specifications, open source, automation, and lots, lots more at AEC Magazine’s London conferences

Industry news
AEC technologies emerge for Apple Vision Pro, Unreal Engine and Twinmotion get new licensing, Alice uses AI to optimise Primavera P6 schedules, plus lots more

Autodesk to take over VAR payments
New changes to the Autodesk business model could be set to diminish the role of the CAD reseller.

Workstation news
Intel Core Ultra laptop processors, Nvidia Ada Generation RTX GPUs for CAD, plus new workstations from HP and Dell

Prime time for iGPU
Laptop processors with integrated GPUs are now powerful enough for 3D CAD. Dos this mean a cheaper, slimmer future?

Enscape and V-Ray: a collaborative future
Chaos has big plans to enhance workflows between Enscape and V-Ray, boost real time collaboration, and more.

Smart reality capture
A new integrated reality capture solution from Looq uses computer vision, AI and a proprietary handheld camera with GPS, to capture infrastructure at scale.

Treble: sound advice
New software helps analyse and optimise designs for acoustic performance.

Informed Design
Autodesk connects BIM (Revit) with fabrication (Inventor) via the cloud to support modern methods of construction.

Scaling-up on-site digital construction
Facit Homes brings new hope to the need to build houses and digitise fabrication.

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TestFit’s first magic trick was lay ing out apartment units and complex parking lots in a matter of seconds. Its primary developer, architect Clifton Harness, was fed up with late nights and overtime spent manually working on such tasks. With the help of college friend Ryan Griege, he founded a company – TestFit – with the aiming of putting automation tools into the hands of architects that were just as sick as he was of some of the humdrum work associated with residential projects.

As it turned out, architects were slow to adopt the tools, mostly due to reasons of cost. But property developers took to TestFit like ducks to a water feature. It is this customer base that has guided development of the tools. (For readers unfamiliar with the scale and speed of TestFit, it’s worth following Harness on LinkedIn, where he regularly posts videos of his application achieving seemingly miraculous things.)

At its heart, TestFit is a massive parametric solving engine. It’s designed to solve for hundreds of preferred site, design, and cost conditions, resulting in a single optimised design option. Because what it does seems like a magic trick, TestFit is commonly assumed to be based on AI. In fact, it’s mostly not AI at all. But even without that ‘secret sauce’, customers generally achieve two to three times as many design iterations per project, the company boasts. And site planning times are around four to ten times faster.

To a European mindset, the kind of multi-family housing on a massive scale that typifies the projects underway at TestFit’s US-based customers may seem alien, but the company still aspires to conquer new markets, and it plans to do so with a broader portfolio of tools. #Up until recently, TestFit’s core Site Solver tool was the only product it sold. It’s a desktop-based application that really makes use of the power of local hardware. Everything is geared around speed. It may not work in actual real time, but it works in as close to real time as is computationally possible.

Many of its competitors are web-based and rely on the ‘fire and forget’ principle, where results are returned after some waiting time. TestFit, by contrast, is about getting one solution, as quickly as possible, that accurately reflects all the input conditions. Historically, that has meant that TestFit’s graphics rendering may have been a little simple or flat, but recently, quality and detail have increased considerably, and without impacting performance.

Spacemaker, which operated in the same feasibility space, was acquired by Autodesk in 2020 and re-emerged as the cloud-based Forma in 2023. While TestFit initially got the cold shoulder from Autodesk, it was eventually invited into the tent and began offering a TestFit plug-in at Forma’s launch. This win for TestFit also introduced its team to the limits of cloud-based applications.

Urban planner

Since the introduction of Forma, the market for conceptual and feasibility tools has become a hotbed of development. A lot of that work is free, or at least bundled up in wider software suites, so that’s practically free to subscribers.

To stake its claim to this space and give the market a taste of what its software can achieve, TestFit has decided to create a ‘free’ version called Urban Planner. This is a desktop-based application that can be downloaded from TestFit’s website.

Urban Planner first brings in site maps or satellite views to start work. Users then create site boundaries and quickly model mixed-use developments with 2D/3D regions in real time. TestFit has included its impressive road creation and editing tool, which is dynamic and generates intersections automatically. Zoning regulations can be defined and applied, and angle setbacks applied to forms. TestFit will then tell you if your massing model meets the code criteria specified.

On the evaluation front, Urban Planner includes quantity take-off, deal editing and deal tabulation, which can be saved. There are direct integrations with Revit and Enscape, and files can be exported to DXF (for CAD software), SKP (for SketchUp), glTF (for saving 3D model views), CSV (for spreadsheets) and PDF. It supports saving to cloud-based storage. What’s missing? The famous parking layout tool is there, but only works in low-detail mode for custom parking stalls, vertical circulation and building core. In terms of building typologies, it will display multi-family, high/low density, core-based buildings, gardens and industrial, but again, at low detail. It doesn’t support unit mixes or custom unit types. For all those features, the full Site Solver is required.

So why would the company develop and give away Urban Planner for free? In response to that question, TestFit CEO Clifton Harness shoots from the hip. Revit’s primary reason for existence, he reckons, is to address documentation. But as far as conceptual design, he doesn’t believe it has been “particularly impactful”.

“Revit never asks, ‘What’s the minimum amount of information that you need to make an apartment building?’,” he points out. “Revit can model everything and do everything, but you don’t really need that when you have ‘commodity architecture’. We are a feasibility company, so we ended up creating a very parametric environment. We wanted to allow a broader range of customers to benefit from TestFit, to input geometry, roads, site splits, et cetera. If you’re an architect, you want that information to be there, but you don’t want to model it. At this point, we had most of what’s in SketchUp as a massing tool already built, plus all these other really powerful parametric real-time tools.”

TestFit is commonly assumed to be based on AI. In fact, it’s mostly not AI at all. But even without that ‘secret sauce’, customers generally achieve two to three times as many design iterations per project, the company boasts

Harness says that Snaptrude, Skema and Arcol – along with a long list of other new companies – are currently developing features that he and his business partner built in their mid-twenties, “because we had to build them anyways, to get to where we wanted”. But since these companies are now headed towards TestFit’s space, “we wanted to put out a TestFit product for free that we’re not ashamed of – a free tool, but with better features than all the others,” he explains.

“This is just the first release. We have a whole year of updates planned for it to make it even better.”

Due to its history of focusing on the US market, the TestFit team has been busy adding some more euro-centric basics, like support for the Euro, metric measurements, and so on. As TestFit wins more customers in Europe, its product should be able to accommodate more European use cases and reflect the variables required in European massing and site planning.

Conclusion

I get the distinct impression that Harness has been taken by surprise when it comes to the extent to which a whole group of BIM start-ups are seemingly focused on the industry’s early massing needs.

The reality is that creating a BIM tool is a marathon. In the early stages of development, massing tools can be useful to show off their relevance and potential to would-be customers.

For TestFit, then, Urban Planner is a flag in the sand, designed to chase off these start-ups – but I really don’t see any of them even contemplating providing the kind of detailed feasibility analysis for which TestFit is known. Few would-be competitors are on the desktop, either. The chances of their cloud applications being able to demonstrate comparable dynamic, real-time performance is for the birds.

Meanwhile, the team at TestFit is now working on generative design. It’s purposely not referring to this as ‘AI’. Instead, it’s a goals-based solver. The user sets the goals and, in real time, TestFit will hit “any target you want”, according to Harness.

In other words, it will provide a solution and populate thousands of other solutions, based on key performance indicators (KPIs) specified by the user. Once they have that single solve, the user can manipulate site constraints and TestFit will resolve continuously based on the changes. It will be fascinating to see how fast TestFit’s real-time AI will be.

Clifton Harness will be talking about the benefits of automation at AEC Magazine’s NXT BLD and NXT DEV conferences on 25 and 26 June 2024 at London’s Queen Elizabeth II Centre.

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Codesign, the architectural-focused concept design tool for the iPad, now has BIM integrations for Archicad, Forma, Revit, and Vectorworks.

With these Codesign Connections, architects can take their initial concept designs into the BIM system of their choice and continue developing and evolving their design.

Codesign is a creative tool specifically for the conceptual design part of the architectural process. It allows users to sketch freely, envision concepts, and explore possibilities while incorporating downstream data such as areas, massing, sun studies, carbon, context, and material implications.

“We partnered with the software teams at Graphisoft, Autodesk, and Vectorworks to ensure seamless integration of the different BIM systems,” said said Campbell Yule, founder and CEO of Codesign.

“After a tremendous amount of beta testing, Archicad, Forma, Revit, and Vectorworks are all compatible.”

Version one of the Codesign Connections are complete, and regular release updates will follow. All subscribers to the app can enjoy the BIM integration feature free for one year.

“We will continue to evolve our performance features based on user feedback and industry trends. When an architect gets into the core of concepting, we want to be the go-to tool that pushes their imagination, fosters their creativity, and produces distinctive one-of-a-kind buildings.” Yule concluded.

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