Willing to pay for flights, hotel, meals and lots of beer? Seriously though, I think that a workshop where folks can meet and concentrate on one product like say Thea or Vray rendering in Sketchup could be a great thing. I'd be willing to help out where needed.

Hi Berry, I'm almost in your neck of the woods. I used to live in St. Paul before committing matrimony and moving south a few miles. I have looked at a number of different mice and came to the conclusion that for me, simple is best. I use an inexpensive Microsoft "Wheel Mouse Optical" USB mouse on my PC and the least expensive Logitech wireless mouse on my Mac. In neither case are there any special drivers loaded. I just use them as plug and play and they work flawlessly. Probably 99% of my SketchUp work is woodworking-related. I think you'll find SketchUp is a great tool. As Marcus said, check out the Woodworking forum. Dave

@glenn505 said: ......a project for me, but something I have been working on for years, and I think it's the biggest leap forward since the original Sturmey Archer AW4 hub, matching that hub in all areas, and bettering it in several. My design is less complicated than a Rohloff, equally efficient mechanically, and automatically shifting by torque, with no ancillary cables. Point is, I need at least some direction on drawing (still somewhat complicated) gears, interfacing in multiple planes, on multiple axis. So far I haven't even been able to get the gear plug-in (Ruby code) to work in Sketchup 8, so I'm rolling backward to 7, but still a little lost in this thing. Pointless asking you to share the sketches. No, I haven't done any serious modeling of gears in the past other than trying out what the native tools are capable of and how I would approach/tackle such a "problem". So I just downloaded gear.3.rb into sketchups plugin folder. You say it does not work for you? Unlike the info on the site, the options are presented in the 'Draw' menu. (So the tools are NOT in the 'Tools' menu). Both 'Involute Gear' and 'Key Involute Gear' do work for me.(in SU8pro!) I can only say (from what I see) that the teeth tops partly do 'share' the same 3D space when two wheels work togheter. Not as it should be. So you would still need to work on those teeth corners. You did not specify where you get stuck with specific SU problem(s).

If you want to use Follow Me, draw a plane that passes through the skull on the centerline of the headband. Intersect it with the skull to get a path for Follow Me. Select all of the edges in that path around the skull and weld them together with Weld.rb. Make sure the path is in the same context as the profile for the headband and run Follow Me.

I think you may have discovered the "average file size" for your system. The simpler the mesh, the smaller the file. Ways of reducing the file would be to inspect for duplicate faces, edges and so forth and to delete these where not needed. Use xray mode to check for internals. The greater the "physical" distance from 0,0,0 the more likely you will have navigation problems resulting in delays. Also colors/materials/textures have an influence on the file. Where repetitive identical geometry occurs, these could all be instances of one component rather than separate components. I think you can help reduce the layers by exploding then renaming the components one by one. Then look in Top Menu: Window> Model Info> Statistics, Button: purge unused, and optionally button: fix problems. You may have to specify the components to be on Layer0, I am not sure. I am not as practiced with layer usage. There may be simpler ways of doing what I suggested. This is just how I would do it given my knowledge level. There may even be scripts/plugins for some of these operations.

Oh thank you very much. Some things are very easy if you know how it works

Maybe you will find inspiration in this: http://www.steelfalcon.com/macrossmecha.html

@pbacot said: Hi Agrazdi, I don't know but choose the paint bucket tool and hold down the command (apple) key to get the eyedropper. This picks up textures and colors. You can use the magnifying glass to pick up colors on the screen, but I don't trust this for a match of solid colors. Don't understand that part. hey peter.. the magnifying glass is part of OS X and it's available systemwide and in all of the color picker palettes.. it's used to sample the color of a pixel anywhere on the monitor exactly as it appears.. notice in the screenshot, the one green material has three different tones due to sketchup's shading.. the mag.glass doesn't consider the shading and will give the color as is.. using the magnifying glass on the cube will give me 3 different colors. if i use the su eyedropper (brush tool + cmmd) then it will sample the material as it appears Prior To having shading applied.. [image: ywfU_color.jpg]

good tutorial bro.. thanks

Hi Guys, Yes, it was the way I imported it. I got the faces! Yea! So now I am working on fixing some of the faces that didn't get made right. I found the tutorial about this so I'll work from there and see if I can get it together. Thanks so much for your help guys-I really appreciate it. Tamera

Thanks for the suggestions. What I wound up doing was copying the component out from the model, exploding it, sub-dividing it into phases, and making each phase a unique component with the same basic name as the full deck. So I would up with components: Deck L1 Deck L1.1 Deck L1.2 Deck L1.3 This way I could also turn on the un-seamed deck at the end to remove the visible joints easily.

Looks to me as if you'll need to update to a gmail account for you to be able to access your page.

If you don't use the added extra that come with Pro then you've answered your own query. But I do think it merits purchasing from the point if view that the day you need those features you'll tear your hair out. As for rendering choice, this seems to grow everyday and everyone has an opinion. It will boil sown to cost and your user level. My recommendation would be Thea Render as it's cross platform, 64bit and very very very good. But that's just me. If it's some integrated into SU I would suggest TwiLight.

Todd Burch wrote a free progressbar script that is available to all developers to use. I use it in a few of my scripts. Unfortunately, once SketchUp stops updating the screen (which is when scripts appear to be "hung", that also freezes progressbar so it no longer shows the correct progress. So its a bit of a difficult thing to overcome. Fredo has done something for some of his scripts, and Didier Bur also did something with Component Spray which is nice. But in the end, it appears that it needs to be handled by Google. Chris

My guess would be that OpenGl compatibility matters most.

@rebeltaz said: ...And my experience would be beginner... If you haven't already, I highly recommend watching all of the videos on this page: http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/training/videos/new_to_gsu.html Once you are done with them, here's another video that may help with organic modeling/cartoon characters without any plugins: YouTube - From a little circle, grows a tree... [flash=480,385:klski4vt]http://www.youtube.com/v/XRAL6MhoMB8?fs=1&hl=en_US[/flash:klski4vt]

@wo3dan said: I don't think this is possible, to have it turned off by default. SU checks if there is one single face/with clean loop in the selection (to create the component) that is sharing the same 3D space/plane with a larger face. If that is the case, then 'gluing to' is turned on as option at the time of creating the component. You can still turn it off. I guess I misunderstood the behaviour - what I should have said is that every time I make a component - and I pay attention to the 'glue to' attribute, I turn it off.... i.e. it's my default, not SU's! @wo3dan said: No, editing a component in editing context does not give you this "opportunity", not by choice, nor by mistake. You can change the components property to 'Glue to: .....' by selecting the component in the component browser and by editing its properties right there. Already placed components however will still be unglued. (This is about native SU tools / Ruby plugins can act different.) Thanks for the clarification. While SU is simple in metaphor - a 3d sketching tool - there are many aspects to its behaviour that are not simple at all, because of the multiple interaction of states and conditions of tools, entities, structures and their modifying processes. Unfortunately the existing official documentation is extremely 'thin' is describing the more subtle aspects of SU. As a new forum member, I really appreciate the assistance of people who have that knowledge and are generous in sharing it. So thanks to all that replied to my post. Very helpful, and a good antidote to the occasionally unavoidable frustration of working with such a powerful - and not always intuitive - tool.

In reference to your latest illustrations, the intersect process will create either solid lines or hidden lines. In MY observation/experience, Sketchup/OpenGL seems to be trying to create logical faces. That is why you see all of those hidden triangles. If you have ever noticed, OpenGL shading(called either gooch or Gouraud shading, not sure which) will exhibit slight shade variations on faces with more than 3 edges, especially on smoothed models. The shade variations are "virtual" edges that will not display as lines, but tend to align with where a logical edge would occur between vertices. Your introduction of the cylindrical extrusion and intersect created virtual triangular faces. [I am not sure at what scale you are working, but it is important to remember that Sketchup does have difficulty with tiny faces, even though this does not appear to be your problem. I only mention it in case scaling also influences the conditions you are experiencing. As recommended by others, scale the model up as much as 100x for the modeling procedure and then by .01x when finished] Again, the above is MY observation/interpretation sprinkled with stuff I have read here and searches on the internet.

I replied to your e-mail Dwain. I'll help you out. Get in touch again. Dave

Hmm, it seems that Sk0tchup has some uv mapping functions under the hood. I tested this and I was amazed... Until now I thought just projecting was the only way to put a texture on a curved surface... It's a pity this uv capabilities are not better implemented