well, he probably work for CIA, old KGB and Mossad at the same time

Email "Jeremy" jeremy@nextlimit.com he's the creator of the plugin. -Brodie

View your model in a Style with a distinctly colored back-face-material - say bright-blue. Now view your model in Monochrome mode and any reversed faces will stand out. As has been said select them and right-click context-menu Reverse-Face to flip them. There are also many scripts available to flip such faces from simple flippers to swapping over front/back materials as well. If the face forms part of a 'solid' [probably required in the export you are doing] then selecting one correctly oriented face and using the context-menu Orient-Faces will flip all of the connected faces to be the same orientation - however if it's not solid you can get odd results as three faces on one edge can never be oriented consistently - one will also be 'wrong' !

Thank you dear jeff

You might be interested in this new tool http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=371243#p371243

I'd like to say its a gift I have... but as I've never written a poem in my life I think it was more due to a lucid moment - & a glass or two of wine! Seriously though, I (& I think a few others, judging by responses) just wanted to say thanks for so much assistance. After working on my own (with just AutoCAD) I started working with SketchUp this year and found SkecthUcation. Its like coming in from the cold! Ok, I'll stop gushing now!

The PageExIm plugin ($5) can do it. It's also included into a couple of bundles. "Manually" you can do this (say export a camera from file A to B) Make a copy of file A and delete everything in it but keep the scenes. Copy everything from file B and paste in place (Edit menu) into file A

If you did things in the order you described, the transparent material is applied to the faces and then you tried to apply the water material after you made the component but without opening the component for editing. Materials applied to faces supersede materials applied to components. Open the component for editing and apply the water material to the desired face.

Set up Styles and Scene-tabs to save view/layers/shadows per tab etc, also use Layers on/off to hide unnecessary things as you model. Work with shadows off and edge-detailing simplistic etc... The when you are ready to render switch on the 'presentation' tabs to see the shadows etc. No one models anything very complex with shadows 'on'... [unless you want to get angry!]

thank you, Jean. it was meant to be my homework after getting some answers in a previous post here Square Carnival Tent. so i tried to learn and practice what i got there. although i joined this forum about a year ago, i wasn't really following until a couple weeks ago. back then, this forum was something hard to understand i am really glad i found this forum. thank you to all of you here.

I have been using a 15" Core i5 mid 2010 MBP for a while. I have 8Gb of RAM and it works perfectly. I use it for fairly big/complex models for SketchUp and Podium. It's fast enough for me, and I have an 8 core Mac Pro in the office. Considering what desktop machines some people have (and there are lots of people still using XP) this machine is plenty fast enough for serious SketchUp work and rendering. Before I had my current machine, I had the old model 15" Core 2 Duo MBP with the Santa Rosa Chipset and 4Gb of RAM. I didn't have a problem with that either. Any decent spec MBP ought to be better than any Desktop PC running XP 32 bit. The DVD writer in my old machine failed 5 times over the space of 3 years, and just before my AppleCare warranty expired, Apple replaced the machine for free with a brand new model of the latest spec. AppleCare is awesome! I would advise anyone who buys an Apple machine to budget for this if remotely possible. If you don't live close to an Apple store, ring them up and they'll send a courier to collect your machine, and return it around 3 days later. They'll even supply a box I haven't seen any reports of MacBook Air machines with SketchUp. I would have thought it would be fine for smaller models, but for rendering or very complex models, the 15" Pro model is the best balance between power and portability - IMO.

Hi Mike, hi folks. If you just want the same opening in both faces of a thick roof, draw the rectangle on one face and then push it through. Otherwise, maybe the attached SU file can help. Roof window aligned with ceiling opening.skp

Tools on Surfaces is a good choice. You could do it with native tools by drawing an arc as a 'D' shape and extruding that through the cylinder. Then delete the flat side and use Intersect Faces to create the intersection. Delete the rest of the extrusion and you'll be left with the arc on the cylinder. [image: Vqta_arconcyl.png]

On the Mac (AFAIK) you can also set the dpi (dot per inch) but in essence it is not needed. If you want a 10" image at 300dpi (when printed), export at 3,000 pixels. On screen, dpi has no meaning at all - it is just a resolution conversion for printing. If you want to print it, you can set the dpi resolution in PS (or any other image editor).

Got it now - thank you. Mike

I hope what I say is not Mac-only... First you may wish to read the manual on printing and printing to scale. Secondly. If I want to print a shape that better fits the sheet I change the proportions of my window to the proportions of the page. There's no exact way (I know of) that does this. Thirdly I never print directly from SU anyway. The quality is no good. I export to .png or pdf and adjust the size for the quality I want. At some point I might crop the image again anyway. But now I am beginning to use LayOut a lot for my printing (Pro version only) if I am just outputting a SU picture. Hope this gives you some ideas.

I minimized the screen and it was back lol

@gaieus said: It seems that you are trying to use tools on surface. This is a zipped set of plugins and it also seems that you managed to install it corretly since it gives the error message. Now go back to that post where you got it from. There there is a link to an additional plugin library "LibFredo" you need to install (these are common files used by many of fredo's plugins so he decided to provide them as a library so that users do not need to install the same functions several times). ThomThom does this with some of his plugins, too, so when you get there, take extra care to the installation and requirements instructions. Often other authors also instruct to add other plugins (such an additional is very often "progressbar.rb"). Thankyou Gaieus sorry to be so long on the reply. I have been using the package without problem...except today, when I now pan my drawing disapears !?!? any ides what may have caused this

Thank you. I was creating a group before using intersect (which I am not doing now) and each object was a solid (by chance). thanks

thanks guys, i got it.