We decided to work on two topics that are highly requested and can benefit most of our users. Prioritizing feature requests is never easy. There have been many SketchUp users complaining about it, but I still think it was the right decision. So we happened to implement area lights, the presentation mode and many other small improvements, before investing huge amounts of time into the material editor for SketchUp. Of course we could have adjusted our priorities to release the material editor earlier, but that wouldn't be fair to our existing customers using Revit.

In December 2017 (after a short closed beta) the material editor was released in preview versions, followed by the official release in March 2018 (version 2.2). But it's also wrong to say, that the SketchUp plugin was useless without it. Of course, many users wanted more control ('Look at what the Revit plugin can do!'), and they were right.

SketchUp had only very basic materials, even less than ArchiCAD has today - Albedo texture with keywords for specific reflectivity settings and for special materials like water. At that time only the Revit plugin supported the full potential of our materials. Let's take a look how the material editor for the SketchUp plugin came to life: Enscape for SketchUp was officially released in May 2017 (version 2.0), with some kind of a beta phase since March (version 1.9.6). As a software developer I try to invest more time in improving the software than in customer communication.

Enscape plugin for archicad