I found this interesting, however I disagree with the architects last few comments. Having a background in engineering and having looked at Gustav Eiffel's book I would say Eiffel's achievement was the more significant, and by a large margin. Also, his tower is 300 m high, while the replica is only half scale. The ground works for the original are very extensive and involved having to work below the water table. Eiffel used pressurised caissons so that his workers could complete the foundations on the Seine River side. To follow is much easier than to lead. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbVhuSRqkqw&feature=related For those who would like to more about the original http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower Kind regards, Bob

Ahh, thanks for the plug. Its ok, I just saw my script get demo-ed in front of a big crowd of folks at the AIA (American Institute of Architecture) show by the Google team. The crowd loved it. And for the record, Fredo's tools - jpp, tools on surface, and freescale were also shown and very well recieved. It was funny because a big part of the Bonzai demo (at another booth of course) was shape bending and twisting, which they said was ONLY possible because they use solid models. I had to chuckle having just developed that ability for SU, which as we know does not use solids at all. Chris

Either I'm a little dense tonight (which is ALWAYS a possibility), or ... If the tower(s) above the arch are at least the width of the columns, this should work as a conventional header spanning between two posts and the arch is simply added under the horizontal beam. Simple span, simple calc ... what am I missing here? This should be even more true if it's only a trade show booth - basically no loading other than the weight of the materials that it's built from.

@frederik said: Perhaps worth mentioning that this is only in US... We don't have anything similar in Europe... Yeah. It says "...across North America and around the world..." but...

Did you hear about the blonde car pool? They all meet at work. A blonde ordered a pizza and the clerk asked if he should cut it in six or twelve pieces. "Six, please. I could never eat twelve pieces."

Me and my buddy's were sending crazy messages to each other last night, it got hilarious rather quickly. Nice interface in texture mapping your face to animate.

@unknownuser said: Thanks Tom. Sketchup has allowed me to get ideas out of my head and into reality. I never had the natural ability to "sketch" very well. I always felt embarrassed by that and it held me back. Once I found a medium that allowed me to express my thoughts easily and naturally I never once looked back. Sketchup is like the back of my hand now I know it so well that its almost a part of me. I see the world through a SketchUp filter. There seems to be a filter in my brain that takes the visual input from my eyes and simultaneously allow the data to be transmitted to a section of my brain to process what it is seeing and also sends it to another part of my brain to dissect it and break it into sketchup modeling tasks. This should be posted on the main website of SU as a "testimonial"

possibly. theres nothing hugely complicated in there and if they used pre-modelled stuff you could cut down on the modelling time. I highly doubt it was done on the fly, though. I reckon there was quite a lot of thought and planning that went in to the scene before they started modelling properly.

In your anti-war protester picture I think you have [inadvertently] included three or four guys in hi-viz yellow coats - if these are police officers then I must point out that it has recently become an offence in the UK to photograph police officers [in a way that might be useful to terrorists]... I suggest you immediately surrender yourself to the appropriate authorities and expect a prison sentence, somewhat in excess of a basic murder rap... If you want to know [or perhaps 'do'] the 'time' ask a policeman... as the song goes...

It's actually back in my garage right now!!! My Brother ride it up for a wedding a few weeks ago and had a lift back to work so he said, best you look after this for a while.... So I get rid of it and then get it back!!!!! reliability was fine, Julian. I only had it 2 years and did a bit of weekend riding on it and a few weekends away to the tablelands, [winding, hilly roads ] and it went like a rocket. Not the most comfortable on long distances but if you give it some you want to be prepared to hang on......

To get a taste for SU without inferencing, turn off all edges and profiles in your style. Then navigate your large model. And remember, its still inferencing all the faces (on surface inference for example). It just doesn't have the edges to inference. It allows for much larger models with the lines off. Of course, SU is useless without edges on since you can't draw too much. Chris

Looks solved.

Walkabout3D: http://www.walkabout3d.com/ (GBP 79) and Simmetry3D: http://www.simmetry3d.com/ (GBP 300) I don't really know if this latter one (beside the ability to manipulate things by clicking) knows so much more. There also sems to be some relation between the two.

Speaking of that land-diving thing. . .I used to watch those guys on National Geographic as a kid. I never could figure out how they didnt pull their legs out of their sockets doing that . .or impale themselves against the tower. Third World Bungee Diving. Insane. . . But I remember hearing that those guys really stoked themselves on Peyote and Red Bull

What a great little clip!

Some of the books can be downloaded as a PDF file. Here's and example on this page on the top: http://www.wdl.org/en/item/2418/pages.html

I saw that on the news last night...but at 10p a page for out of print or out of copyright books; for the price of a couple of such books you could buy an e-book reader and just download the text from Project Gutenberg.

@unknownuser said: lol. This one's for Jeff Hammond: YAY! there are a few F.L.W.'s in there

I doubt that SU was involved in the animation at all. I'm guessing that CS is custom scenery and that's what SU was used for. IMO the scenery isn't very impressive anyway. It's just an unobtrusive background for the coaster.

that guy needs to learn a modeling app, something with physics support