Thanks guys! I'm fix'n to let out the contract for cutting Sunday Morning. SketchUp Pro just got a whole lot more expensive. They've just notified users that the price is going up over 40% next year for the year subscription. I just paid this year's renewal at $237.00 and next year it's going to be $346.00. I don't know how they can justify that increase. It's getting really expensive for the occasional user like me.
They have the "Free" version available, but it's no longer a client version residing on your own computer. It's in the cloud. Furthermore, it does not permit using any of the add-ins and extensions that I use. And I have a ton of them including the Podium rendering software, which in itself is an expensive (for me) yearly charge. Together they'll be close to $500/year, and that's way over the top for the hobbyist like myself. To help pay for the software I've cancelled almost all of my print magazines except for Scientific American and Fine Scale Modeling. They didn't add up anything near $500.00. That places software as a much higher expense than the hardware I use. Good 3D printers are $300 or less today.
I don't use SketchUp every day. I use it when I'm designing a project and then not much at all. It averages about 1 to 2 times a month. That's more than $40 every time I touch. That's expensive!!
There are other 3D packages out there. Blender and Mesh Mixer stand out as powerful packages. But they're very difficult to master and I've been on SketchUp since Ver. 1.0 in the 1990s. You can teach and old dog new tricks, but it takes a whole lot longer. I may have to bite the bullet and master them and then dump SU. They're getting piggy.
