Are you talking about profile lines? Could you post a screen shot?

I tried an Install/repair to no avail So I have completed an Uninstall/Reboot/Install and that has fixed the problem. Just would have liked to have found out what was going on. Lets just say "WinDoze" Dave

Glad to be of service. You can snap enpoints to midpoints and midpoints to end points too.

Eport a PDF or EPS file from File>Export>2D Graphic. Illustrator can open a PDF file, and the EPS file is identical in content. When you open a SU-generated PDF or EPS in Illustrator, the image is combined into a single entity. I have found that right-clicking on it and selecting "release compound path" will let the individual objects to be edited. I am not an Illustrator expert, so the exact terminology escapes me. Note that the PDF or EPS export has no textures or shadows. Printing a SU model to PDF with a PDF printer driver like Adobe Acrobat generally produces a raster image file. Anssi

I used a method similar to Remus but with ctrl+erase between steps so that clean up is quicker and easier. Have a look at the attached file. [image: 9kSK_Twistedcollumn.jpg] Twisted collumn.skp

Theres always podium. Its about as simple as oyu can make a renderer. At th emost basic level you jsut apply a reflection value to each surface, turn on the sun and press 'go'

not long time in country. Sorry. With a sphere. Turn on hidden geometry. Select the whole spherE. center point is readily visible with hidden geomtery. Click with the move tool on said centre point and proceed as I explainde above. If the center point of the sphere is on the wrong axis for your placement requirements, there are a number of ways to proceed but one way is to rotate the sphere from it's center point 90 degrees and then continue as above

G'day Sweet glad that helped, sorry about that, as i said at 5am not the sharpest knife in the block you can use trapezoid shapes , just make sure that your line tool is inferenced in the direction you are taking the line blue = up/down red left/right etc. colour by axis helps a lot, lots of little tricks like that on the boards. [image: qWGa_stairlanding.jpg]

Two cents worth from a SketchUp newbie. It depends on what you really need to do, but it seems you can do 2D in SU quite well. I'm a dyed in the wool Paint Shop Pro person. (2D from Corel, and you can download a trial from corel.com.) However -- and it's a big one -- the older versions such as 7.04 and 9 are much better if Ebay or some other entity has them. You might check my little offerings of exteriors on http://marlisepsp.tripod.com/ and fabulous interiors at http://www.jaddell.com. BTW, PSP is much less expensive than Adobe Photoshop and there are plenty of tuts online. As for me, I'm going to be using both because it's so much faster and easier to do a 3D view from any angle in SU and then export it as a JPG to PSP for some extra cosmetics. --Marlise

I had a look at the columns. Fine, really nice! I'm an archaeologis myself (although in a "remote and rather barbarian province" we rarely find all those classic(al) orders). Still I teach them...

Thanks. Screen grabs and callouts with SnagIt; you have to use screen grabs or if you want to show any of the SU controls. Edited the final image in Xara because it make sit easy to re-size and shuffle on the page. Bob

Definitely it is !!! Thanks a lot. I will now read the tutorial you did mention. (but I am not really found of the 3D guy ! it is for shadow test I guess )

Jean, Thank you for your prompt reply. Alas, I don't get what you describe. What I get is a large color wheel with six icons across the top: The trick is that the fourth icon (looks like a brick) reads "Apple" in the little window. It's when you click the little up/down arrows that the whole list of available materials appear! At that point, when you select one of the items in the list, it is as you describe with the left/right arrows, the house and a pull-down list. Thank you for your help in getting me to investigate more closely.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. That explanation makes perfect sense and coincides with my experience. I ended up taking a screenshot of the images. Now that I know it seems to be the 'only' way to accomplish this I feel a bit better.

It may even be z-fighting (when two faces are competing for visibility). A screenshot would be helpful.

That seems like a program fault to me. You could get the blackout effect by setting the wrong custom time zone in the Location dialog in Model Info, but that wouldn't explain why the time slider and time readout are giving different times. They ought to be inextricably linked.

Yeah, 37mb is a very big model. You should be able to shrink it down by going window->model info->purge unused This gets rid of all the materials and components in the model that arent actually being used.

solo, very nice... I'm still trying to figure out how to do it, but basically you have what I'm looking for... I just need to figure out how to create the canvas on the back of the apparatus...

If you can find some suitable 2d replacement plants, you should be able to place a plant, select it and go in to the components manager (window->components) and right click on one of the 3d components and select 'replace with seleceted', this would make dealing with the vast amounts of geometry a bit more feasible as you wouldnt have to make it visible.

Smoothing won't physically round-off the edges...for that you would need to use a subdivide tool, like the recently released Subdivide & Smooth Ruby script. A more exact and efficent way of doing it would be to model the gun the way it actually is...using circles/arcs...rather than just tracing it and Push/Pulling. There is a similar thread here. I explain how it's done about halfway down the thread.