see if this little tutorial is of any use. stitching tut.skp

Welcome Dermot. My only additional advice would be to watch all of the GSU training videos (if you have not already), some of them more than once. http://sketchup.google.com/training/videos.html

Thanks for your responses -- the differences between polygon modeling vs. nurbs explains a lot.

No problem. We are all detectives here. SP is not the "easiest" plugin to use but I'm sure you can do whatever you want with it once you get the hang of it. AFAIK it can already do magnetism.

@redinhawaii said: are you on a Mac too? Forgot to mention, yes of course. Otherwise I woudn't comment in this thread.

plz... I need it till tomorrow (CET)

As I thought and fumed about this, my son suggested it might be a video card problem, so I copied the file to another computer, and problem gone! So thats' it....I guess it also means I need a new laptop. Thanks for your input

Sure, why not (if I understand well). After all, for the section cuts to get animated, you need to use scenes and certainly nothing stops you to change the camera position as well as active section planes between two, given scenes. See (very basic and primitive) example attached. Section+Camera.skp BTW really cool video!

This is one reason why the general advice is; never change your active layer from Layer0 to anything else. You shouldn't be drawing (primitives/raw geometry) anywhere else than Layer0.

All you can do normally is to use the Move and the Rotate tools to get things aligned. Sometimes you need to Scale things to perfectly align endpoint to endpoint of different shapes. Where exactly have you got stuck?

I am a beginner, but I can't help my self... It looks like a miss-placed section plane.. try to set section planes on in the view toolbar... Hope that I am right

Yes, that's definitely an antialiasing issue. Not a big deal however as it can be overcome easily as Jeff says. If it'son your screen,don't bother with it. It is video card dependent and you can set the value at Sketchup (Window on PC) > Preferences > OpenGL > Hardware acceleration (if it is checked). It will however only affect how you see it on-screen (I've worked on machines where it was even inaccessible because the video card didn't support it at all). But when you export an image, at the bottom right of the export window there is an "Options" button (at least there it is on a PC) and there you can set AA as well as image compression quality but as Jeff says, if you export at higher resolution and resample the image later, it can give you even better results. If you are intrerested what this whole hassle is about, read this article at Wikipedia about antialiasing. @popple said: first time on your forum and beginner in sketchup. The best combination. We haven't had dinner yet.

Many do that; exporting stills (not only jpeg's but also png's or even tiff's) and converting into a movie in an external editor. You always have better control on image quality,compression and all those fancy things SU has only basic settings for.

I am with Sepo...

@unknownuser said: what a weird coincidence. I was just in the process of modeling a goldfish bowl and was trying to figure out how to model/render the water as opposed to the bowl. Cuz it just wasn't working for me.! Thanks for the TUT! Made my day reading that it helped out, glad to be of assistance. Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions. EDIT: I'd be happy to make a video of it, what software does everyone use to make those neat video tuts? Is it free?

Although there are certain (and different) ways of doing it, the easiest would be to simply delete one of them (or actually you can even leave it there), then use the PushPull tool and simply push the leftover half to the other side. It will leave a curved surface behind - right what you'd like. So the approach is not to do what you want if you cannot do it but use a technique that you can use just from a different point of view. And welcome to SCF.

I'd definitely love to confirm if I were on Mac.

Hi folks. Keep in mind that using small dimensions will produce small facets and that SU cannot fill a face which has a side smaller that 1 mm or about 0.04 inch. Since you are talking about a thickness of 100/1000 I presume that you are talking about 0.100 inch. If this is the case, the bending will produce segments that will be smaller than the limit and you may experience facets not filling. Do not despear. Draw everything larger than real size by a factor of 10 or even 100. The faces will close. When done, scale down accordingly. The faces will stay closed. Just ideas.

Is the model aligned to the axes in SU? (I mean the original world axes) Also, have you set your camera to parallel projection in SU?

I'm guessing it's to do with how the transformations are controlled, i.e. you basically have to do it by eye. As for the 2nd part of your question, i think fredo is the best person to answer that. Perhaps post in the original thread, more likely to be noticed there id imagine.