View the SKP in Monochrome mode, using a Style with a distinctive default back-color - perhaps 'bright-blue' - compared to the default front-color 'off-white'. Then you will be able to see the orientation of the faces' fronts and backs without any applied materials getting in the way. The direction of a face's loop determines the face's 'normal'. A 'flat' counter-clockwise loop produces an 'up' normal, and vice versa. This applies both in Ruby and manually made faces, However, any face that is made 'flat', on the ground z-0, will ALWAYS faces DOWN, irrespective of its loop direction. This is to assist in a subsequent PushPull which is usually 'up' and gives the expected result it the extruded face is facing downwards... Wrongly oriented selected faces are easily 'Reversed' using the context-menu, or in code with face.reverse! If it's a mesh with some wrongly oriented faces use Monochrome mode and View > Hidden Geometry > ON. Select one face that's correctly oriented and context-menu 'Orient' to flip all other faces to match. If there are any edges with more than two faces then the results will not be perfect because more that two faces sharing an edge cannot all be oriented the same way - topologically impossible? There is no simple API equivalent for 'face.orient', but there are some method examples around, using 'edge.reversed_in_face' etc and 'face.reverse' etc... Most rendering apps are particularly sensitive to visible back faces, and will usually render them without materials/textures - i.e. 'blank' - either transparent, black or white. remember that materials applied onto a group/component-instance [rather than onto the faces within it], will appear to be applied onto any default-material [both fronts and backs] although in that case the faces actually still have no material applied, but 'exploding the container' will transfer them across. Monochrome mode helps see this too... My FixReversedFaceMaterials etc and some other similar tools [e.g. by thomthom] are designed to flip incorrectly oriented faces that have a material applied to their back only, and assumes that the back is facing the wrong way, flipping the face and the material, keeping UV-mapping of textures correct too. There are also some 'forced' options etc that might help when both sides of the face have materials and you want to flip and swap materials across too...

After you edit the component and add a centerpoint, before exploding all the instances, delete all the geometry of the edited component (thus all of the instancing) leaving the component content a single guide point - otherwise all those small pieces of geometry will remain in the model as stray geometry which will cause all sorts of issues later. @sketchymick said: ...it relies on the imported points actually coming in as instances of the same component... which I'm not sure would happen... It's easy to fix it if it is not the case. First create a component with a single guide point. It will appear in your component browser just like the others. Now select all the other components (in the entity info box you can see that the "definition" is greyed out as there are three, different definitions selected) and right click in the endpoint component in the component browser and "Replace selected"... [image: ZAtC_replace-1.png] ...after which you should end up with this (see that the "endpoint" definition name appears in the Entity info box showing that now all are of the same component definition): [image: 1acB_replace-2.png] The only caveat is if your original components component axes are not in the center of those small circles/crosses. But even that is not a big issue if they are very small as the difference will be minimal which is all right for a topo I presume. [mod=Note:kveuhw7v]I named my component "endpoint" but it should have been "guide point" - sorry for the misleading naming...[/mod:kveuhw7v]

Thanks guys, all good points and clears it up. Dave, thanks for the pics, really helps. Inspecting mirrors is a job I could easily see myself doing.

@bob james said: @Gaius Whose guitar music is that??? Super music. I have no clue, Bob. I just grabbed an example from YT.

What TIG is preaching is the truth! Always draw everything on layer 0. Only assign components and groups to specific layers. Once you get in this habit, problems like this will go away, and you will find that the layer management control is much more straight forward than ACAD.

Do you have pictures which show the windows details and the dimensions?

Welcome! It's probably best if you use SketchUp's official stl importer: https://github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-stl

Speaking of skewed lots and buildings. While in college I rented a cheap little house that was built on a circular street (a church was in the center circle). It was a very narrow pie-shaped lot. The main room was pie-shaped. With crossing ceiling beams it was sort an optical illusion, as the room looked bigger or smaller, depending on where you stood. Very funny.

@rsguernsey said: Is there any hope for me? ... Nope - none at all! Just enjoy!

thanks so much for all your help and suggestions. hopefully i can produce something using the tools you have all recommended! much appreciated

you could use simlab or something else like it: http://www.simlab-soft.com/3d-plugins/3D-PDF-from-sketchup-main.aspx also, (i'm not sure how this works or if it works in windows world), you can export the model as a collada file then view it with an image viewer which will give 3D/navigation etc.. Preview.app on mac is the default viewer which will open a collada file.. maybe windows has something similar?

Hi folks. There is more than a straight line that can be used to close a face from ends of arcs. This simplify works by avoiding unnecessary intersections. See this SU file for ideas. Curved face.skp

@tig said: Perhaps 'spear' is a typo of 'sphere' ? Ah, yes. I see. I was reading it too literally.

I am keeping all plugins in the 'plugins' folder and not in any other folder of my choice. So deleted 000_AdditionalPluginFolders as you advised. The error messages are gone! Thanks.

And you can even ("easily") embed SketchFab models to your site [web 100%,480:1j3xbs5r]http://skfb.ly/ki3fdcba?autostart=0&transparent=0&autospin=0&controls=1&watermark=1[/web:1j3xbs5r]

Geometry 'sticks together'. Draw a face. Draw another face that touches it. Select just the first face and Move it. Parts of the connected face will distort as you do so, because they are also connected to the first face. However, had the two touching faces been inside their own groups then they do not interact. As Dave says, you have given the 'slabs' insufficient thicknesses. Walls are anywhere from ~4"/100mm to ~14"/350mm depending on what they are made from and their function. Floors and roofs will be about 1/10 of their 'span', down to about 1/20 depending on their materials and function again...

@danna said: Also got some excellent tips from a very kind member (Dave R) what if you also share those tips with us here?

@taffgoch said: That triangular-windowed roof makes a grand addition to the design. It could, just as easily, have been composed of rectangular windows, with triangular windows at the intersections. Have you compared the appearance of triangular vs. rectangular? -Taff (Make no mistake, I'm a fan of triangulated constructs.) it would seem like rectangles would make the number of different parts increase which would cause the cost to rise as well i might take a look at it later but for now im happy with the triangles

Dave told you what was wrong, either the entire model was made a very long distance from the 0,0,0 of the SU model, or you had some geometry hiding way out far away from the origin. That is one of the only things that will make "clipping" be that bad.

Some of the questions are difficult to answer beacause it is only possible to choose one option, but a great idea and I'm very interested in the result...