I apologize for not answering all of your query, but I just jumped in while we wait for the actual "great masters of the Sketchup medium" to respond. I could guess that it could be a combination of hardware and software. You may have taxed either the application or your processor. My best wishes to you.

Nice renders

Can you post an SU image or the model so we can see what you are trying to render?

Hi Try browsing our 'Organic Modelling' forum http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewforum.php?f=335, and ask questions there...

Like in your other topic, what I suspect is that their axis system is somehow "inconveniently" set up. Check to place the content (change the component axis) so that when imported into another file, they are normally oriented.

Switch off color-by-layer. Switch on View > Texture mode Imported objects should now look OK. Obviously everything else will look pants! You need to then apply colors/materials to the 'home-made' parts. All 'raw' geometry [faces] take an applied material. Groups and component-instances will take a material if faces are in the 'default'. You can edit a group/component to apply materials to parts inside it, any left uncolored will take each instance's material - e.g. car with black-tires, glass-windows, red tail-lights etc can have default-shell and there have different colors for the main areas... IMPORTANT: faces have a front and a back. You should always model so the front of the face is 'out' - i.e. where it's normally seen. If it looks like the default-back material [usually 'bluish' as opposed to a 'whitish' front - depends on your 'Style'] when seen in View > Monochrome mode, then you need to select it and right-click context menu 'Reverse' to flip it over...

There you go. Now just correct the face orientation inside the slot and your golden. I've set the back face color for my default style to the green you see above. It's easier for me to pick out on the screen so I can keep face orientation correct as I go.

nice links. never thought of it. might work. yes xml will be a bitch. No, storyboard would be easy. Im talking prototyping entire dialog inside sketchup. no camera movement just dialog. dialog tree is xml file of entire dialog with certain character. like when you play adventure game you click on character, then he says hello massage and you are offered couple possible questions, when you click on them he gives you answer where you get new questions or your just brought back to first screen. so all of that in one file is called dialog tree. its mostly in xml and in modern games like starcraft 2 or dragon age or neverwinter nights its done in scripting language like ruby or lua. thanks for advice, I tried scripting so Im not master programmer but I really need to do this. Ill post my progress...

Pro has several advantages including various additional exporters that a CNC machine's software should be able to cope with - like DXF - there are some exporters that might do it 'for-free' with Free. So first work out what the formats your machine[s] need and then see what you can do with 'Free' [+ 'free'-scripts] - otherwise, you'll have to bite the bullet and upgrade to Pro

One question and many answers. Generally the answer is yes. You use a park bench as an example. One way is to just create a vertical plane through the middle of the bench. Then intersect the plane with the model. This cuts the bench in half, then you the erase tool and get rid of half the bench. Of course that leaves one side of the bench unsupported. So you take the remaining bench end and duplicate the end piece. If the end piece does not have left/right symmetry, you copy the end piece and scale the end piece to -1. Now you have a flipped bench end to attach to the unsupported end of the bench. Instead of erasing you can also select half and delete the selected half. Su8 also has dynamic components. I have not used them much, but the idea is you can make a component called bench and give it a length attribute. Then you can look at the components attributes and if length is one of them, you can reset length to any value you want. Lets say you built a car engine and the air filter was a component. You just select the air filter and then delete the instance of air filter from your model. There are also layers. A layer could be something like all glass windows in a house. You delete the entire widows layer and all window are gone in a key stroke. Yes, you can erase anything.

Personally, I use Zorro2 and I would suggest it to you as well judging from the tasks that you are in. From my experience, it is by far, one of the best tools out there that helped me slice models. It is very easy and user oriented as when compared with other tools.

TIG Once again, thank you very much, you have been a great help.

In addition to TIG's description, perhaps the video here would help, too. It isn't meant as a step by step basic tutorial but you can see the process I use to draw a table or any other piece of furniture.

It sounds to me as if you either have the circle drawn outside a group or component. If so, the Push/Pull tool will extrude a cylinder but it won't create a hole because the plate, being in a group/component is protected from being modified. Delete the circle, open the plate g/c for editing and then draw the circle and push it through.

Stuart, you've got your problem sorted out now but I thought I would make a suggestion. Make a keyboard shortcut for Edit>Delete Guides. This will make it easy to clean up your model from time to time. Depending upon what I am working, I might use a lot of guides. The model can get quite cluttered so the keyboard shortcut gives me a quick, one button clean up. To set the shortcut go to Window>preferences>Shortcuts. In the Filter box type "Guides" You should actually see Edit/Delete Guides as you type the 'u'. Then click in the Add Shortcut box to the right of the Function list, type your shortcut and hit the '+' button Hit OK and you're good to go.

Thnaks Gai, have you used IDX renditioner?? Pls see my another post regarding it.. Thanks, Mandar karve

Becca, could you post a screen shot of what you're seeing? Are the components you're importing "Face Me" components? If so and you don't want them to have Face Me behavior, you can select the component from the In Model component library, right click on it and edit the properties to untick the Always face camera box.

As for the windows, here are some steps I generally put a Gothic window quickly together. Without any further explanation - so if you have questions, refer to the image numbers... Just one note; at the end of the "tutorial", we end up with a window (see also attached) whose outer part is there but if you want to get it to cut both faces of a thick wall, some further steps are needed. Edit: some of the png files are so small (in file size) that this stupid forum software does not even create thumbnails. Please, click on the attachment links. [image: Ewod_01.png] [image: DGAB_02.png] [image: 2FLc_03.png] [image: lXMf_04.png] [image: HcUM_05.png] [image: 6YoG_06.png] [image: 3uge_07.png] [image: XEpH_08.png] [image: 8qL8_09.png] [image: 8uEL_10.png] GothicWindowExample.skp

sort out already thanks for the help. nice and awesome plugins.

Sorry I realise that was a bit unlcear. The Pachube link was a community project and despite my asking thr CTO (!) not supported. They do have a Ruby API to pull data from the feed and that is supported I was really hoping that someone might know of a plug in or a project that did something similar, anything took some variables in a Ruby script and applied them to a series of solids in sketchup - to vary height etc proportional to the variable would be very helpful, and we could probably build on that to connect it into Pachube. Any help much appreciated Chris