i see.

@unknownuser said: I notice Dublin as your location. The irish contingent is slowly growing here. Soon we'll dominate Im originally from London half Glaswegian. But married to a Dub for 22 yrs and living here in Dublin for 15

Sure. You will have to re-adjust your toolbars and what not but this is a solution to the original request.

Outliner has some real power behind it, particularly when it comes to big models, and managing groups and components, which you can view in hierarchy, relocate within that hierarchy, Filter, select and delete. I think it is one of the gems of SketchUp that a lot of folks don't take advantage of.

The "large orange rectangle with arrows" is a Section plane. Anything on the one side of it will be rendered invisible. So you can select the Section plane and hide it, move it, or just delete it to reveal your model.

Yet another way; Draw your circle as you would normally Select all (your circle), now select the Rotate tool Click once but do not release the left mouse button but drag it horizontally until you find it aligned to where you want NOW release the mouse, pick another point and start the rotate operation as you would otherwise. I wish the circle and polygon tools worked the same way...

Scarpino's book Automatic SketchUp, Chapter 12.

Eric, You might try a more CAD like program for what you want to do, such as DoubleCAD. I haven't used that one personally, but I hear it is good (and free). For what you are suggesting I would import the pdf into my CAD program, but it isn't cheap and it's on the Mac. Try also: eDrawings by SolidWorks. It all depends on what formats the program you use will accept. You may need to translate to another image format to bring the image in and scale it up, to be able to draw over it and measure. Note that bitmap images do not have discrete elements to measure. You need to trace or use your measuring tool over the image--without aid of snapping points or references. Always see if your associates can provide dwg or dxf files, which are vector files that SU and other programs can open, and DO have discrete elements that can be directly measured and manipulated in many programs. Another way to say what TIG and Hono have, I guess. Peter

Never mind... I am answering my own post. The book was not exactly clear on the fact that you select the move tool, press alt, but then pull with COMMAND since I am on a Mac. Thank you Mr. Chopra for your video tuts on You Tube.

i have a simple way of sketchuping this sofa first draw it straight boxed for the sitting part making the base and coussions as boxes then round the corners of the top and bottom faces of the cousions then in order to make them bombe'( or have a belly) use either round corner with a bigger radious or draw rays to the edges and make them meet on an edge of a circle then move the circle up a little and it will create the bombe' you want.other way is to make a shallow dome intersect with a rounded corner box and remove the exess. now for the arms and the back extrude them using the cross section of the arms which consists of a rectangle an 3/4 of a circle. extrude this profile using a wide u-shaped path but filet the 2 corners of the u shaped path before using the follow me tool. now you want to make the capitone' recessed buttons ..it is easy. drow small circles at the exact locations of the buttons according to the pattern you want. then offset each circle about 5 or 6 cms ( this is the radious of the recess of the button) then connect both the inner circle and the outer one with random rays then pull down the inner little circle that represents the button using the move tool ,this will make your capitone' style. for the round detail of the coussions edge use a tiny cercle to follow me the edge of the coussion. for the front of the arms offset the face and use the generated offset as a path for tiny domes with the base of those domes sitting on the face of the arms using copy along path plugin. at the end smooth evrything to your satisfaction then texture with a shiny rinkled black leather texture and use also small domes horisontally and vertically as buttons after texturing them with black leather. for the helmit brass nails on the face of the arms use also tiny domes but texture them gold or brass or bronze texture. and enjoy your sofa regards hesham

Thank you very much. This is an amazing program.

It sounds like you got it figured out for what you needed. It would have been nice to see the model before you cleaned it up so we could nail down the problem. Nice model BTW!

Chris, this is a pirenesi question, the hand icon sometimes stays active and I can't change the command, Thanks

I've updated the driver on my old laptop and switched off OpenGL. Now it looks like it's working without crashing which is very handy. Don't know what did it but thanks. My 17" laptop still working fine but outputting black 2D images?

Wow! Thanks for the help and the education regarding what it takes to make it rotate a precise number of degrees. It was way past my skill level! Thank you again. Sincerely, Bill

Is there a tutorial on utube that you know of... Thanks, Michael

TIG, thank you for the help. I think I screwed it up when I did the layers and grouping. Old CAD habits Thanks again for your help. I'm sure I can get it to work now.

@martinrinehart said: @cantonis said: I would really like to know if there is any way to add trees to projects by designing trees or even import from photoshop without having to put up with a 15-20 MB file. You have identified a serious problem. Keep your trees in a separate layer. A truly huge tree layer will not slow SketchUp down if the layer isn't visible. Good evening Martin, To tell the truth, in the last few days I tried that same thing that you suggested and it worked! That simple! I only make the layer visible when its time to render and voila! Victorius! Not exactly what I had in mind but it will do! Thank U very much for your help!

I made a handle quite easily using Curviloft, just create the profile at the end of the handle and at the middle, draw the curve you want between those two profiles, then use "create loft following given path and you have half a handle. Make two and join them and add your end bits. Yes it makes for a large file size, but it makes a nice handle. [image: Handle.jpg]

Martin, That is a clever approach -- great if you just need a rough representation of the model, but inaccurate if Guy needs to actually build from the model. Here is a picture (exaggerated scale) that shows what happens when you scale the top of the stool. The tops of the legs are scaled down as well, making them thinner at the top. [image: 2YgQ_Capture.JPG] Here's how I'd do it, sorry I've no time to make pics: Make the seat, turn into a group/component, move it up to the desired height. Use guidelines to mark where a leg will be on the bottom of the seat, draw the leg and push/pull to length. Make leg into a component as it will have more than one instance in the model and any changes will be updated in all copies. Select the leg and rotate out 15* using the top edge as the hinge. Ensure the leg is positioned correctly, then use 'intersect with model' to miter the top of the leg to fit the seat if necessary. Select the leg and rotate/copy by 120* the component around the center of the seat as Martin suggests in his description above. Guy, does any of this help...Martin's instructions or mine? If you need better descriptions, just ask...someone will help