oh yes, that would be great. because at the moment SketchUp is limited to small, single designs (surely partly because it has difficulties coping with large models). enabling it to support real teamwork would be such a wonderful thing. and you know what would be funny (not reasonable - but real fun)? if you had realtime teamwork. for example you have one location. three people are drawing at different buildings, everyone sitting at his own computer. and on the huge flatscreen in the lobby you see an overall perspective where the buildings are permanently manipulated... (would probably bust your network in no time and you needed a giant computer to render the realtime shadows. but it would be such a cool poser thing!)

you could in the outliner window select all geometry but the "mother component" you want to manipulate, right click it and choose "Hide" after manipulating the component, select all the hidden geometry and "unhide" it again. it is of course a bit laborious. but at least it is already possible. but I would love some improvements of the organisation of components too. for example that you can hide nestet components (created within the model) in the components window - you know, some kind of tree structure

yeah, some more modifier keys would be really cool. some examples: Move Tool: press Shift+Ctrl to break a line at the cursor point (so if you hover over the midpoint of a line, press these keys and move upward, the line is broken and connects the endpoints and the altered midpoint) [image: FYaJ_break_line.jpg] press Alt+Ctrl to do the same, except that an arc is created instead of simply breaking the line into two [image: IN1k_create_arc.jpg] that would sometimes really fasten up some operations.

[flash=425,355:1eiho4la]http://www.youtube.com/v/3vrlJFOCbsM[/flash:1eiho4la]

I would be totally happy, if the bounding boxes of groups would allign to the actual axes. if you change your axes (for example to fit a house into an existing survey model and still be able to refer to the house's axes), SketchUp still alignes the bounding boxes of new groups to the original axes. that can drive you mad (and made me cheat with the compass orientation instead of rotating the building to its correct orientation). but your idea sounds interesting too.

Jim that's terrific. Can't wait to see the product.

I agree with you on a small scale or from a community perspective. This option would greatly speed up game level production, though. With multiple people working on one large level, it takes a lot of time to step through all the objects and manually update them (or at the very least, stop by everyone's desk and ask them what/if they changed anything from the day before). It's definitely a low-level difference, having an option to externalize internal elements. I could maybe see a script or external app. that could compare/check SU against external elements, but I suspect that parsing process would get bogged down after a hundred or so files.

This is true - there have even been discussions about this with the developers. It now works like in old DOS times when an ESC command closed the applications.

The ideal grid: it can be scaled by a hotkey which doubles in size it is infinite (no need to set distance points) it isn't an actual object in the Outliner it has line weighting (ie. every 4th or 8th line is darker/heavier) it adjusts its visual screen draw to prevent moiré patterns if in an orthogonal view, it covers the background (ie. front, top, right) it is tied into the snap distance and unit of measurement Thoughts?

Thats quite a list! I'm gonna have to disagree with you on your first point though. SU would be way too cluttered if 1/3rd of the plugins available where installed, there would just be too many to sift through, especially for a new user who doesnt know what any of them are meant to do. including some of them would be wicked though, like joint push/pul and soapskin. not forgettign adamb's lighting plugin, that could also fill your 'lighting' point on the wishlist

Thanks for the feedback I appreciate the information and advice. As you say, it is a workaround. I would still like to see a more direct, built in, approach to achieve those results. Thanks Steve

Yes it does, Ken; some kind of multi-level, collapsible layer system. Just like in Win Eexplorers menu list on the left. Well, as I remember, Todd is thinking about such a plugin.

Thanks John, By Gradients I mean the slope of ground away from the cut line. say 1 in 4 or 1 in 2 etc....

Jean, I think this capabilty for the Circle tool is one that would be happily received. I think this is a great idea. I don't see why the existing circle tool couldn't incorporate this functionality (perhaps by holding the Alt key while drawing on an edge). I bet it is possible to do with a Ruby script right now (see some of the features in the new Joint-Push-Pull script for interactively setting the "Prileged Plane"). TIG's Pipe-along-path.rb already puts adds a circle tangential to the endpoint of a path.

Yeah, it rather sound like a ruby target (although grouping and collapsing layers as well as material folders in model is a nice idea anyway - Todd has gotten the "bait" for this latter one already )

@jclements said: I was thinking it would be cool if you could associate sound (at least a narrative) to a Scene Tab or even an entity. If the SU Viewer is used, then when a the Scene Tab is clicked on the narrative would play or, if the Scene Animation is played, the narrative would be played as soon as the Scene is queued (the Scene's minimum display time would be restricted by the length of the narrative). If the model is opened in SketchUp, then allow the presenter to trigger the narrative by Control-Clicking on Scene Tab or entity (if the cursor passes over a "sound-entity", the cursor could change color or shape to indicate a narrative is available; likewise, the Scene Tab would have a different color or tagged with an icon to queue the presentor it has a narrative). Good ideas, John! I'm not sure it can be done exactly as you describe, but maybe close enough. Sorry I can't make a commitment to working on it - hopefully someone will pick up on the idea.

Good idea. Or maybe make it a toolbar like the layers etc... then you can place it where you want.

Only if you have profiles on. I never have them on unless I have some difficulties with separating faces and need to see which line is the "culprit".

Take a look at the script Joint Push Pull http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=57&t=4840

couldnt you just cut out the face area, project the texture and then stick it back onto the head? probably more work and not as good results as exporting it though