Today is an exciting day around the SketchUp World Headquarters out here in unhealthy +colorado&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=53.035373,81.5625&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Boulder,+Colorado&z=12″>Boulder, Colorado. We’ve just kicked off our third bi-annual “3D Basecamp” to a crowd of SketchUp-savvy folks converging on The Dairy Center from all around the world. I’m looking forward to some great conversations about SketchUp and 3D modeling in general over the next few days. But that’s not our only news today…

We’ve also finished work on SketchUp 8, the next major release of our favorite 3D modeling tool. We’ve been heads down and working hard for most of the last year, and I’m happy to be able to share with you the fruits of our labor.

Google SketchUp 8 includes a batch of exciting new features. We’ve made it easier to build site context models for your projects using our ever-growing collection of geo-data. We’ve added a new collection of “Solid” tools for doing common additive/subtractive modeling operations and we’ve packed out LayOut with some new features that make it easier to document your models professionally.

Ordinarily, those of you who use SketchUp in a language other than English have to wait a few weeks for a version in your language. But not this time—today, SketchUp 8 is available for download in English, French, Spanish, Italian or German language versions. (We weren’t able to get all our translations done in time for release today, but keep an eye on this blog for news about SketchUp 8 in more languages soon)

As always, SketchUp Pro 8 is available for $495 from our web store. Upgrades from any previous version of SketchUp Pro can be had from for only $95. And, of course, we’ve still got a version of SketchUp available for free. Head on over to our main website for all the details.

You can be sure we’ll be talking about this release a lot over the next few days at 3D Basecamp, but I want to make sure that those of you who weren’t able to join us in Boulder have a chance to let us know what you think, too. I’ve posted a new Google SketchUp Questions and Ideas series. I’m listening, and I’ll respond to as many of the top posts there as I can.

Google Sketchup Pro 8 (with LayOut 3) is now available for purchase or upgrade in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. You can find out all about the great new features in this short video. It’s really quite simple to upgrade from previous versions of SketchUp Pro to the latest one: If you have an active license for SketchUp Pro 7 (or 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1) you can upgrade it to a SketchUp Pro 8 license through our online store. Once you’ve purchased your new, upgraded license, you’ll receive an email with two important pieces of information:

1. A link to download Google SketchUp Pro 8 (if you haven’t already)
2. License information you need to authorize your software

If you’d like to try it out before upgrading, please feel free to download an eight-hour trial from our website.

Here are some more things to keep in mind:

• The cost to upgrade each license is US$95, EU€83 or UK£68.
• Please have your current serial number, registered user and company name available when you visit the upgrade portion of our store.
• If you do not have your current serial or authorization number, follow these instructions to locate and retrieve them.
• If you have any trouble upgrading, please visit our Help Center for more detailed instructions.
• If you purchased a SketchUp Pro 7 license on or after August 1, 2010, the upgrade fee is waived as long as you upgrade on or before November 1, 2010.
• If you have an EDU license that is not yet expired, your SketchUp Pro 8 upgrade is free.
• If you purchased a SketchUp Pro license through one of our authorized resellers, please contact that reseller directly for upgrade terms.
• If you have a need to contact us through the Help Center in the near future, please keep in mind that while we do get a little bogged down at release time, we will do our best to get back to you as as quickly as possible.

Thanks for your continued business and happy sketching!

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it. – Steven Wright

If modeling the planet is like painting a house, Google provides a lot of different brushes. Internally, we have these big paint sprayers that we’re using in major cities to cover huge swaths of suburbia in a single stroke, but when it comes to the fine work, Google SketchUp and Google Building Maker are the hand brushes. They allow people all over the world to fill in the gaps, perfect signature buildings, and smooth over the mistakes left by the big rollers. With SketchUp 8, the geo-modeling brush set is better connected with Google’s massive geo-data paint bucket than ever before.

Jumpstart your model with Building Maker

SketchUp 8 can open Google Building Maker models downloaded from the 3D Warehouse, and every image used for texturing is automatically created as a Match Photo scene, saving you huge amounts of time gathering measurements and photographs of a building.

Open your Building Maker model and the new Outer Shell tool can merge its primitives into a single SketchUp mesh. From there, the revamped Scenes dialog box and Igloo Mode makes organizing and navigating between your scene tabs a snap. There are even new Style settings for the opacity of Match Photo overlays and backgrounds. A new Back Edges line style provides traditional hidden-line visualization of edges behind or inside your building, and the Push/Pull tool now has a preselect mode that allows you to move faces that you can’t see from a given scene.

Get highest quality, full-color terrain and imagery

The new Add Location feature allows you to import terrain directly into SketchUp without having to fire up Google Earth. Your imported terrain is higher resolution than it was in SketchUp 7, more accurate, and now in full color. Also, Photo Textures from Street View in Google Maps are now part of the revamped Google toolbar.

Model in context

If you’re designing a new building, you can use Building Maker right inside SketchUp 8 to create context models around your site. Simply Add Location to geo-locate your model, and then click the Add Building button. If your site lies in one of the (ever growing) list of Building Maker cities, you’ll be able to create the surrounding buildings in a fraction of the time it would take to model them from scratch. Also, you can find nearby buildings that others have modeled by selecting “Nearby Models” from the Navigation drop-down menu in the Components Browser.

Posted by Scott Lininger, SketchUp Software Developer