hi, you may need to use 'align view' and 'solar north' to switch between two [or more] 'modeling axis' if you use solar north on an empty drawing you'll see it follows the green. if you draw a plane ['rectangle tool'] at origin it follows the red/green axis's, if you then rotate the face 45° >>right click the face >> select 'change axis', any new geometry, groups or components will use that axis orientation. Now rotate you face back to solar north >>right click the face >> select 'change axis', and any thing you draw will be at that axis.... john

As I said, not with skp files. There are a couple of 3rd party applications however that can do a walkthrough kind of presentation from SU - both free and commercial (and there are also 3D PDF solutions but they are best for product views - to rotate "from outside"). Would your boss be interested to spend a couple of hundred dollars for something like that?

Wow so this has being an ongoing topic for some time now, this cant be, why doesnt google do something about this, theres so much more that can be done with sketchup if this feature existed, i dont think google relise how important this is to so many others out there, they should addreas this issue, i know there are other programs out there designed to do these animations like Blender, 3DMAX, but i have created models in sketchup and i would like to keep using sketchup for my creations instead of learning to use another outside program to do so

In LayOut, you can print to scale when you are not in those "Standard views" but in orthogonal (i.e. axonometric kind). I believe that the development team tries to focus their attention and resources on LayOut when it comes to 2D output (other than image export) and will not develop and enhance these functions in SU any more (after ll it would mean doubling the work and developing redundant functions). Certainly LO is a Pro only product but I can imagine (and understand) they also try to "encourage" sales this way.

Downloaded it, did the twist and then used shape bender. Thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction! Franka

Your pointers were very helpful and, because of them I've increased my facility with the bezier curves. Now I'm confident I can get the results I want - thank you. Inkscape was the model I had in mind when I did the first post, but I didn't consider the fact that it is a vector drawing program and SU isn't and I suppose that makes for a difference in procedure.

@gaieus said: Exactly. The polygon tool works just like you described. You can activate it from the Draw menu or activate the toolbar it is in from the View > Toolbars menu Thanks so much, I'll try it

You can set the image resolution to recover image quality. Image warping is another matter. If you can not tolerate image warping you need to use unwrapping as the texture mapping method. Before you establish a trust in create texture tool I would suggest trying it with simple geometries (fewer faces looking more or less the same direction) first. Unwrap method may fail for (not too much) complicated geometries. Spherical projection needs to find a projection focus from which all the selection is seen from the same side. Let me try to give some examples. Here is a cylinder textured with standard textures and methods ( cylinder works with regular texture method in SU. [image: cylbefore.jpg] In this case I selected the whole cylinder side and called create texture with png (we have a transparent section) as the image format and unwrap as the mapping method. [image: cylafter.png] Observe that now we can erase the planar edges. The newly generated texture is like this. [image: cyltexture.png] if we select spherical projection as the mapping method the created texture image is like this. [image: sphericalmapped.png] To be able to create a nice mapping I had to triangulate and upsample the cylinder. The solid color (red) section contains arrows and edges drawn in it, these are sometimes useful, and easy to erase, in an image editor. Similarly for the following house (ish thing) [image: housebefore.png] for which the created texture is [image: housetexture.png] In SU texturing ngones may be troublesome, I sometimes triangulate the faces just to be able to get a good uv map. The attached skp file has the examples. texturexxx.skp

Have patience there are people working on it...

@tig said: So theoretically you could [re]set the @@playcmd.small_icon() etc dynamically in response to a user clicking the button and/or the tool's @state changing etc... There's no problem with changing the path to the image (no exception is raised,) it's just that the UI::Toolbar instance ignores the change. We've tried closing and opening the toolbar, but no effect. This is a change that needs to be implemented in the API using the relevant system calls on each platform. (I know how to do it on Windows making a Win32 call, but not on Mac.) So, this is a true wish... add my vote.

OK Ben, I guess I skipped some crucial detail. The amount of virtual camera tilt must also match the up and down tilt of the real camera. Could you post your photomatch project so I can see where things seem to be going wrong?

It really would be a good feature if it could be done. Sort of like you can shuffle history in Photoshop.

There has been other pressure for a native STL export tool - the last I heard was Google are thinking about it... There are some third-party STL export tools that do work quite well, once you have your manifold solid.

Too bad. Get a mouse for SketchUp jobs. The quick access to the navigation tools with the middle mouse button is indispensable. Look at the SU system requirements where it (not incidentally) says "...3 button, scroll-wheel mouse". However, if you insist, the Orbit (and Pan: Shift+Orbit) tools have a special behaviour when launched as tools used by the left mouse button (or equivalent of the touchpad): whatever tool you were using before, if you press the Escape key while in Orbit or Pan, you will be put back to that tool (so no need to select that particular tool gain). But this is really a "hidden" and rarely if ever used feature since (as I said and also suggested by the developers), most people use a proper, 3-button mouse.

I got soft-selection in Vertex Tools: http://www.thomthom.net/software/vertex_tools/ Whaat also has soft selection and other tools useful for organic modelling in Artisan: http://artisan4sketchup.com/

Why would Google run to improve Sketchup? It already has very big number of users because of its ingenious interface. I don't think they'll try another product for other features SU doesn't have. At least not soon.SU doesn't have a competition. It is unique, one and only. It is like Volkswagen Beetle, @Last hardware . It was not made for "every year" new profit, like Windows. @Last software was good name for it. It doesn't need improvements besides its golden plugins. Not yet. The only thing that could happen is to move more features (old or new) to Pro version...

On the Mac version of SU you could easily import them. On Windows, you need to convert them to something SU can import. If they are vector data, find a program that can convert them into dxf for instance and then import that. If they are simple raster files, convert them to image first and import that into SU.

Hmmm... Ok, jst wanted it since the DL includes callback function and the ruby itself is cleaner and better, but I know there's a diff way - I could jst use the Win32::API utility to get/set callbacks.

very nice. thank you TIG.

Maybe it could indeed be part of the style settings just like some of the PhotoMatch settings have been moved there (then you could even have different dimensions styles assigned to different scenes in SU and not at model level) but do not forget about LayOut again; it was first introduced with SU 6 - along with the new style system - so the developer team may have already had the vision to eventually transfer all ("professional") 2D documentation to LayOut. This may also belong to the area of business policy (to encourage pro sales even if they do not prohibit commercial work with the free version). Who knows. They also need to live on something...