If all of your faceme objets have shadows that fall onto a flat surfaces (vs. hitting walls, steps, etc.) then maybe you could make a dynamic component with two sub components. One sub-component is the face me object and it faces the camera. The other sub-component is a fake shadow. It is the same object but with translucent gray fill and it is on the ground. Then this would be set to face the sun vs. camera, and ideally would set the length of this to scale based on the hight of the sun angle. Maybe an alternative is to swap out your face me objects for real 3d objects just before exporting to Vray. If you don't like the look of these 3d objects you could always make a duplicate rendering with your faceme components and layer in Photoshop to mask these back in. You would just have to make sure the faceme objects are slightly larger than the 3d objects, and you run into issues of seeing the same object from multiple views, don't know how Vray deals with that and faceme objects.

Would a dynamic component work with random attribute built into it. But when you take your first instance and copy it to other locations, I don't know if it re-calculates the random#. I haven't really used the random feature before. But I can see where it would be nice to quickly click on component instances and have it randomly replaced with a component from a specific list. At the start of the ruby it could ask for names of components to include in the list, or maybe the ruby is written for rubys with specific prefix in their name.

@unknownuser said: I fixed it because of your very useful comments...

Thanks very much !

You have exited your Tool so the View refreshes... selectSelectionTool changes to that tool... No hack... No magic involved...

THanks Will check it out!

Here's my 2 cents strictly as a user. I tend to agree with TIG's view. But I think there may always be some overlap, because strict division of function or content requires discipline, and in the heat of the moment to express an issue, maybe the discipline takes back burner. I do peruse the dialogue in Developer's Forum when I see it in New Posts. I even scroll through the coding when it is displayed, in a vague hope that I can make sense out of the language conventions, or simply to marvel at how bizarre and foreign it is to conversational language.

You can't you must use something like Joint PushPull by Fredo6 or Projections by Didier Bur...

@tig said: .. but to do it within a script .. doh! .. actualy for me it's time to go to sleep

If by chance you use Firefox don't miss this one!(free) That pick image, part of screen, or screen and directly open online in a Toshop like! (free too) Advantage? : It's free and you are not obliged to at be home Fractal is'nt it? [image: D4d9_Screen.png]

I don't like the initials idea. I'm probably here early enough to lock up "mr" but Mike Roberts and Mary Ryan may not be so happy when they get here next year. The Java sort-of-standard proposed by Sun (inverted website names) never got popular. Too long. A ten-pound cure for a one-pound problem. I think that using the name of the plugin should be SOP. VisMap is in a module named VisMap. That means that before you release anything, you Google it, which is a good idea for a lot of reasons. A Wiki or Google doc re bad plugins would be most helpful. "X is bad" is not helpful, but "X is bad because..." would tell you what not to do so that you don't end up on the bad list.

@tig said: Now right-click on each of these new Materials in turn and pick Save_as, and save each of them as new skm file, say into the ../Materials/Wood folder. Thanks to you I not only got my woods into Wood, but I've also got a Materials dropdown that doesn't overflow and need scrolling, I've got A_Personal_Palette category with the stuff I use all the time and I've got rid of, for example, Colors_Named. A million thanks.

An example to the explanations of TIG. Karlheinz flatroomtest2.skp

@chris fullmer said: I'm amazed that you keep coming back to the observer's Thom They have caused you so much pain already. well... that's the part I haven't done yet. there is an issue with the area calculation SU does when you have skewed groups/components. haven't gotten to the part of adding the observers yet. But I dread it. I've yet not dared to go back to DoubleCut.

Yea, template snippets would be nice.

@yaza said: The use of this plugin would unfold the volumes starting from a chosen face or vertex. I only thought of 2 possibles in interpreting your curt question - there IS a third ! Look for Jim's 'unfold' ruby available through links here...

You're my target user, Chris. Hope the link helps.

I think I read threads where users sucessfully moved Podium to the main pluginfolder. But there seem to be mulitple scattered files. I've given Jeff a nudge. I think he'll be able to help when he comes online.

Well, I did indeed play around quite a lot to see what's happening when I am doing this. My approach was to reload the image and then go to top view and toggle undo/redo to see the difference between the B&W and the colour version. To be honest, I didn1t see any difference so I basically trust the method - true that when I go quite close in my area, the imagery is not the best as well as in those rare cases when I use this technique (to paint some small scale, artificial terrain for GE), any subtle difference would be rather unnoticeable.

Just as a note: I had posted the same questions in the SMustard question section. Rick forwarded the question on to Dale Martens who responded back to me. By then I did (with all the suggestions here) have it solved, but I did let him know the methodology used to solve it. Good on them for the response.