@gaieus said: Also, here is a whole collection oflinks you may be interested in: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=486 Ok, there's the mother lode. Thank you, Gaieus. I had a feeling a question like this would have been covered in depth, but I wasn't quite sure where to look as I'm new around here still Thank you so much.

@ecuadorian said: If it's a Dell, it might really explode. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32550 http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//005359.html http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/08/dell_fire.html Just joking; it's not only Dell laptops which can explode. The problem is in the batteries. Some other manufacturers have experienced similar problems, even Apple: http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/macbook_inferno_an_apple_macbook_battery_catches_fire.php http://altatecgt.com/blog/2006/09/08/macbook-se-une-al-club-de-las-quemaditas/ http://www.nowhereelse.fr/macbook-explosion-16747/ http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/06/27/disaster-on-the-homefront-macbook-pro-battery-explosion-no-images/ http://www.appledefects.com/?p=259 Just to be on the safe side, why not assemble a desktop PC for rendering? And please, don't put your "laptop" on your lap. its not a dell its an HP and it runs fabulously compared to the dell i had, are those all linke to computers exploding?? dont want to see that i may be scared to render then!!

Hi Alan, Thank you for your short tutorial. Now I finally understood how to use alpha masks in PSP. That brings me a little further into the question I had asked in this topic. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=23243 Thankyou Karlheinz

@solo said: :scale: Wins Polonius Prize for shortest useful post!

@nutech said: Hi can someone tell me why it is when I use the Push/Pull Command it doesn't always raise the walls I am trying to draw together. When I was a newbie I thought PushPull was a flake. It's a brick. I was the flake. Did everything with Lines. Lots of opportunity for drawing lines that are not coplanar. Not coplanar defeats PushPull. Rectangle and oFFset are always coplanar. Draw all your walls, outside first. Use the Rectangle tool when you can, the Line tool at need. Pull the whole thing up to the depth of the floor. Select all. Group as Floor. Create a layer named Floor and move Floor into the Floor layer. Use the oFFset tool (caps = keyboard shortcuts = easy SketchingUp) and type your width into the VCB to get the inside of the outside walls. Add the rest of the walls. Use Rectangle often, Line rarely and oFFset whenever you can. Turn the Floor layer invisible. Select all and create a WallPlan component and move it into a WallPlan layer. Pull up walls. Group and move all into a Walls layer. From now on, show either the WallPlan or Walls, but not both. (You won't want Walls in the way when you model interior bathrooms, cubes, etc.) (Much later) Make a single window in a separate file. Model as much detail as needed. (Resist the temptation to model all the detail. In a model this large no one will ever see details.) As a guess, try a box the width and height of the window, the depth of the wall or a scootch more. Offset inside an inch or so and PushPull out the center, leaving a frame. Today I was working on the "frame" Ruby from the second half of the tutorial. It's slick if you like windows parallel to the red axis. Tomorrow is green axis day. Keep in touch.

Hehe... I am not a teenager either (and was already over 40 when encountered SU)

Thanx ! I didn't think to create a box which fit my object ! It's easier of course ! Thanx.

Hi Pontilaki, hi folks. The showing of vertices via the styles is only a visual effect. Vertices can be manipulated, whatever their appearance. The inference engine will show you a pop-up message "Endpoint" and a green dot when you position the cursor over any endpoint. Just ideas.

@brrbtr said: having some trouble getting doors and windows to properly cut into walls The bane of my newbie life! You watch the tutorial: the SU master Rectangles the opening, PushPulls it into the wall until it meets the far side. Voila! Perfection. You try it. Your Rectangle won't PushPull except in the wrong direction. Or it freezes up half way in. Why? The two sides of the wall aren't perfectly parallel. (Close isn't good enough.) Solution: use the oFFset tool to lay out your floor plan. Perfection without effort. There's other geometry in the way. Harmless-looking lines on the far side, for example. Also, use Camera/Standard Views/Top to look inside your wall.

sorry I should have added this quote (see below). this is where I got the set of shapes. I did manage to find an folder under programs>google and they show up now when I use the sketchup 7 program. But they actually show up twice when I clk draw>shapes. Since I only require them once under draw maybe you can help me fix that boo boo. I know I've done something incorrectly. ciao **@tig said: These are the old 'shape' toolset made some years ago - they still work. Unzip and put all 3*** of the files into your SUp plugins folder and you get a 'Shapes...' sub-menu under 'Draw'. *** There are two versions of 'Shapes' for metric and imperial users. Only put in one of these rubies - ShapesMM.rb is metric(mm) and ShapesINS.rb is in inches. If you put in both you'll get two identical sub-menus but both with metric default values since the MM one loads last and overwrites the INS ! There's a list of the basic shapes then available: Box Cylinder Cone Torus Tube Prism Pyramid Dome Sphere [I added the sphere to @Last's original list]. The created shape is made inside a group and it is 'parametric' - select it and right-click context-menu to Edit its values later on as needed. You can explode it back to it's base geometry but then it will have these values 'frozen'... The 'parametric.rb' and 'mesh_additions.rb' rubies are needed to make the whole thing work.**

@unknownuser said: b) I was curious if I sampled the projected material and then painted another face, if the projectedness would be copied to the new face. yes, but i'm sure you probably tried that already

Thanks ! problem solved.

Hi Klokl, hi folks. The perimeter of each end cap is smoothed (or softened) and thus, its surface is "joined" with the cylindrical part. To change that, try this procedure: 1 - Show hidden geometry. You can now copy the end cap but its edge will keep their smoothed characteristic. To change that, continue at step 2. 2 - Double click one end face to select it and its perimeter. 3 - Right click on one of the selected edges of the perimeter. 4 - Choose "Unsmooth" or, if some edges are smoothed and other not, "Soften" to bring the Smooth/Soften" window. 5 - Slide the softening cursor all the way to the left to unsmooth all selected edges. 6 - Now the end cap can be selected and copied away. Just ideas.

That did it! Thank you very much

@unknownuser said: I started with a circle with 48 sides and made that into a sphere before starting to deform and shape it, but I was hoping for a polygonal solution (like an icosahedron except more triangles).. any idea where I can get a tool that makes these kinds of spheres? Did you try Add Detail in the Sandbox tools? It will double/subdivide the selected faces. This may not be what you want, however.

@bjornhk said: I need to be able to import a 2D vector file (AI/EPS, WMF, SVG, PDF or other) into SketchUp (non-Pro), but there's no such import filters, it seems. Theoretically, it should be possible to do this by converting the the file to a DXF and then import it using the DWG/DXF plugin, but i can't find any reasonably priced utility that converts to DXF/DWG... Does anybody have a suggestion how to go about it? Bjørn Illustrator is the best commercial tool for this. For free, this should be doable with Ghostscript (a free Postscript clone) and suitable free plugins (PSTOEDIT). It's years since I had a look into it, but it is still available. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit/ Anssi

How could we forget that topic, Simon?! And although in the course of your posting there, not much feedback was given, as you can see, people did read it and yes, they remember it.

My TrueTangent Tools do indeed repeat the manual steps set out as Jean describes... They just do it easier for you...

There's a curved stair tutorial here... If you don't have a 2D CAD plan [as used in the example] simply draw the 2D plan in Sketchup first and group it, then work off that... http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=158602#p158602

@tig said: What you have model so far looks pretty well thought out... except... I suggest you make all of the elements into groups (or components if they might be repeated). [...] O my, I wish I had started out doing this (making each major new area of the model a layer). Trying to select stuff after the fact, group it, and layer it, is pretty tedious and delicate work. However I have done some of this and it is useful to be able to turn on and off entire design elements like Roof, Walls. Thanks for the thought-provoking tip!