You're a legend..... nuff said.

Simply perfect, TIG!!!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to do this no matter how simple it is; you're a bloody gem!

Very particular thing!

Okay, solved my own problem - -Copy Comp A -Make copy unique, rename as appropriate -Open copy and select all nested components -Make unique This preserves all relationships and renames all the components without having to select each group of components individually. Minimum number of clicks. A plugin would save me a couple of clicks but I can live with this. Kris

Mike, thanks. Jolran, yes. It'll probably take a combination of plugins to get what I want. Pilou, thanks. The radial lines could be a step toward what I want but it isn't the end. It also requires the c point and the edges to be in the same context but I don't want to have to explode the components in my model to be able to use the plugin. I made a quick example that I hope illustrates what I have in mind. [image: X42m_GeneandStacy1.png] The model image export without shadows [image: 2nl0_ShadowLines.png] Shadows made up of the same sketchy lines as the model is displayed with. I imported a shadow image as a watermark and traced some of it. Then I used the Hatch Faces plugin to put hatches on the faces after which I applied the sketchy line style. [image: ZCm6_GeneandStacyshaded.png] The result. It needs refining but I have to go to work. What I did is very tedious. Few if any of the edges of the shadows are on axis. Some are just off axis which makes them difficult to draw correctly and you must be careful not to move the camera after you get started drawing. No zooming in to work on the short lines. A plugin to create those lines would be excellent. TIG's Shadow Projector plugin seems like a good choice but it doesn't do what I need.

cotty you are my hero..that works... i had never known this function. @dave you are right. thanks at all and thanks to dave, Don't trouble your head about it. dean

Yeah Dave I have them like that, and I have made rigging points off screen. But it struck me there must be some way of giving each component a specific point without constructing a skeleton off to the side. I just found JointSU, will see if that works.

My SplitDonut with split the ring face at the corners... Note too that SplitSausage does the same for 'non-rings' - you need to 'seed' a short edge so the splits proceed as expected. To find 'rings' [faces with ONE hole] in a selection use a filter like: m=Sketchup.active_model;s=m.selection;f=s.grep(Sketchup;;Face).find_all{|e|e.loops.length==2};s.clear;s.add(f); You can then use SplitDonut on the selection en mass... The command you could add to the end of the above code to automate things is m=Sketchup.active_model;s=m.selection;f=s.grep(Sketchup;;Face).find_all{|e|e.loops.length==2};s.clear;s.add(f);TIG.splitdonut(); To divide multi-holed faces you need to add a line to make one-hole 'rings' ...

@renderiza said: @3dsmax9 said: loop selection is great, is it possible to do a ring selection ? ThomThom's Quadface tools has a ring selection feature and more. : Have a look at how I defined a"quad" in QuadFace Tools. Both Fredo and TIG use that in some of their plugins which give a nice interobility. https://bitbucket.org/thomthom/quadface-tools/wiki/Overview#!quadface-definition Just a brief history of why I picket the set of properties I did for the diagonal edges: Hidden property doesn't smooth the shading of the quad. Each triangle would be shaded flatly. Soft+Smooth give nice shading, but if you want to make the whole mesh also appear soft+smooth then the quads will break. Soft+Smooth + CastShadow=false gave the best result for me. Once could create a mesh with quads where the border edges of the quads could also be soft+smooth. I didn't use an attribute because they are slow - performance was important here when traversing thousands of entities. And I liked that you could create the quad manually via the UI if you wanted to. The one thing that is still an issue is that if you use the Soften Edges tool in SU it might unsoft some diagonals. @renderiza said: @thomthom said: Have you used GitHub and git before? Github | Bitbucket I now love Repositories like Github & Bitbucket they are really useful and make my life easier so thank you for mentioning them. Excellent! If you aren't using it already I'd recommend SourceTree as a really nice and good GUI that can handle both Git and HG as well as managing your repositories hosted at GitHub and BitBucket. I'm in the progress of writing a new set of core classes that will return quad faces from a set of SketchUp entities. I'll make this as generic and small as possible (and fast) so ti can be easily implemented in extensions that want to support quads. I'd love to see more quad-based tools. QuadFace Tools grew to a decent size, but there is's just the basics. There is much more that would be great to have.

oh yes thank you

I didn't realize it did that... that does suck. I also hate subscriptions into infinity. But man does he make some kool tools.

Entering values in the VCB is how you make changes using the native tools. That's not a work around.

There's a Zoom Extents in the Context menu that will do what you need. No keyboard shortcut required. Right click the desired entity and choose Zoom Extents. You're there. Can't get much more user friendly than that. It works on selected edges and faces, too.

it wasn't her... It was Stephane O. She's working on adding floor geometry to this plugin. http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/oob-layouts Here's her site and she has lowered the price. 50% off. http://oob-su.com/

@dave r said: So what did you change? I re-named the material.

Saw it, but I missed it coming out of Beta...

I have flattery but the tab function doesn't work on 3D solids. I like to rough in my pieces and then add the tabs but flattery creates more work in the process and I can't specify lengths/squareness. It just takes the entire line segment and adds a tab. I need something to add like 5 tabs equal distance from each other and equal size along this parts edge. Also I need to intersect components not faces. Intersecting faces is a nightmare to clean up and not worth the time. I want to overlap two components and then intersect them without ever breaking the components up. Then I could make keys with the tab pattern in them and create the first piece then mate it to the second and intersect again. Slot 4 Tab would be really close to what I need but it's not working and the thread has not been updated since 2010.

Actually I think it works quite the same way, only you don't type 'x' or 'y' but choose a direction (that is, X direction means Y coordinate of the point selected) run the LINE tool move the cursor over the first reference point, don't click the LMB, just let the point becomes a green dot hit the arrow key (right for x direction) now the Y coordinate is locked, just go to the second reference point click the LMB, the line will start at desired X-Y point [image: 8XMY_capture_001_07112013_162805.gif]

Thanks TIG for your response. Ken