Dear Lazyweb,I think that SketchUp is dead to me now. I started using it because it was free, simplistic, and mostly worked. Well now it's very expensive, still simplistic, and still only mostly works.
- The only free version is now a web app.
- The only app version is now like $300/year.
- The "free" web app is missing basically all features; anything even remotely useful is an up-sell.
- The web app won't talk to my 3DConnexion mouse, and all versions of SketchUp are intolerably, utterly unusable without that.
So what should I be using instead? My needs are:
- Maintaining the gigantic DNA 3D model, hopefully in a format that other people can load.
- Very simple and precise editing of low-poly DXF files for xscreensaver assets.
- Not spending a zillion bucks for software that I use maybe twice a year.
- Not devoting months of my life to a plumb-line-like learning curve before I can do anything.
A few years back I learned Maya, but I hated it and I've forgotten it all. And I'm told that Blender is terrible for CAD-like tasks.
Fun fact, there are no online converters that can read and convert SKP files. Even the ones that claim that they can. There's a Blender plugin for importing SKP but it doesn't work. I have an export-to-DXF plugin for SketchUp 7 but it barely works. I'm sure it would omit like 30% of my DNA model and all of the textures. Maybe SketchUp's built-in DAE exporter works better, but I haven't tried. The SKP file format is turning out to be a lock-in nightmare.
In an ideal world, the DNA Lounge model would be a thing that one could fly through on a web page, or by loading it as a level into some game software, but hey, let's not go crazy here.
I know that several people have imported my model into various other systems over the years, but I believe that every person who did so did it destructively, editing it in a new system in ways that can't be reversed.
