@frascati I came here to find out how to form an elliptical cone, but didn't see a simple way. So I had to figure it out for myself. Yea, this is an old thread. I'm posting this here in the hope that someone else searching for the solution might find it. Draw a circle. Make a triangle with one point on the centre of the circle, one point on the edge, and the third point at the height you want the cone. Select the edge of the circle. Choose "Tools —> Follow Me" and click on the triangle's face. You should now have a circular cone. Choose "Tools —> Scale". A yellow box with green handles should appear. Click on the centre green handle on the vertical box of the selection that is in the dimension you want to make smaller to create your ellipse. Touch the modifier key that causes both sides to scale about the centre. On the Mac, that's the OPTion key. Move the cursor inward until you get the size of ellipse you want, or type a scale factor into the "Measurements" box. That's how I created the following elliptical cone, with a length-width ratio of 0.5. [image: 1775272020099-screenshot-2026-04-03-at-20.06.14.png]

@Zuzana777 You should select the group containing the guide points, not launch TopoShaper inside the group.

Hey Jessica, I've had luck with both the cad formats dwg and dxf... IFC is probably the best option for SU to Revit though.. you have to create a project and import it in my experience and Revit handles it more like a family than a revit model.

@msau said: Hello Fredo, same here. [image: 1774361879969-round-corner-seats.jpg] It seems that the seat was released....

It's 99,9% related to clipping planes tolerance To troubleshoot this you can type in Ruby console Sketchup.send_action 10624 Then in the windows which will pop up, check the "Force" flag and try to play a bit with "Near" and "Far" parameters. If the "Model Far" is a really huge number compared to the actual expected size of the model (causing the "Far" clipping plane to be REALLY FAR, then you can have that kind of floating-point-precision-related z-fights happening like in your screenshot). There are a few reasons that can trigger this kind of behavior (which is the pretty much the opposite of the well known "clipping problem"). Usually there's something REALLY FAR from axes origin (maybe a tiny stray segment miles away from world 0,0,0 or possibly you accidentally created a misplaced copy of your 3d text which for whatever reason ended up at light years distance from model space). In that case you can try to select whatever should actually be in your "intended" model (maybe temporarily group & lock it for added safety), then invert the selection and erase whatever else is in the model (this will clean up accidentally misplaced geometry that you can't see because it ended up into some different solar system) and everything should be fine. Another possible reason is that some of the objects in the model is actually in the right place, but its internal coordinate system has the origin miles away from model origin. In that case you can troubleshoot that looking at object bounding boxes or if you want to fix that super-fast, just install the "Axes Tool" plugin from Thomthom and recursively select components and sub-components and run the tool in order to place the object's axes in the center of the bounding box. Being that you apparently have just a few objects, you could just try to explode and regroup them one by one and that could fix the problem. Another reason which comes into my mind that can trigger this kind of glitches, is when you have some "giant" component and you scaled it insanely small compared to the original size.. in that case you can try to "scale definition" (or, again, just explode and regroup it) and that should fix the problem in such specific case. If you created your 3d text insanely big and you scaled it a lot, that could be the culprit. If none of this fixes works, maybe you can share the model and I could try to see what's goin'on exactly.

That is an embarrassing DUH on my part. I don't know what the heck I was thinking. It is there clear as day. I am embarrassed beyond belief

Did you open the Ruby Console while performing steps? Error msgs ?

I also get the "cannot hide layer that is a part of the active path" error when trying to Generate Quadmesh from terrain. This error occurs even when selecting the contours that are grouped. What fixed it for me: move the group of contours to the root context. This error seems to come up if you are working within nested groups. TopoShaper seems to only work in the master context. Ruby Error - CLEANSING - 24-Feb-26 10:33:43 - SU2025.0 - LibFredo6 - v15.8e.txt

Thanks for this post and resolution, I'm coincidentally having this exact issue on the same tutorial! Good practice for sure. -R

Happens to me all the time...I just thought it was a standard thing like when you draw a line to cut geometry and it creates a new white face over your existing material face.

There are many examples in which SketchUp files, especially larger ones, have been fatally corrupted when they've been saved directly to an external drive location. In many cases the data winds up being replaced with zeroes. Often all of the data is replaced with zeroes. The general adice is to work on the file while it is saved directly to an internal drive. If you need the file to be on a server drive or out in the cloud, copy it to that location after a successful save to the internal drive. Also, you should be regularly purging unused content from your models, keeping material file sizes reasonable, and keeping polygon counts under control.

Nailed it. Thank you!

On PCs in v2026.1 some nitwit swapped the order in the Preferences >Shortcuts listed for the Edit commands for Copy Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Insert, and also the Cut [+X/+Insert] and Paste [+V/+Insert] etc, so the Edit menu now gives you an illogical listing because the long established ones now come second and so they aren't listed in that menu. They still work, Unfortunately they are hardwired and not editable in Preferences>Shortcuts. Hopefully common sense will revert this weirdness in the next update.

False alarm, I used wrong login

If you turn off the tags for the parts you don't want and set up a scene to show the object(s) you're interested in, you should be able to export the view. Or use LayOut. It would be better for setting up the view and getting the desired export.

I tried it with my very old ImageTrimmer, and it took a very very long time ! Then I tried it with Fredo6's new https://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=Pic2Shape It took 25 minutes, and I had to manually hide the edges and stand it up, but it worked well. Here's the SKP v2026... trimmed.skp [image: 1764023259784-trimmed.png]

Did you change the number of segments in the corners from the model you shared? I used the geometry in your model and didn't make any changes other than fixing the location of the axes and moving the model to the origin. Out of curiosity what are you expecting for the outside diameter of the round part? What are the expected dimensions for the rectangular part? You say you want the walls to be 1.2 mm thick. If you are selecting 1.2 mm for the offset in your model, the walls will have practically no thickness.

Hardware wears out and software updates change things. When using old software that isn't being updated you need to look at the things that are changing.

@icorrea I don't think it has anything to do with the number of curves in your model. It's a fairly simple one. I agree with Rich. If you are having problems it's most likely the graphics card or its drivers. What version of SketchUp are you using? Share a screen shot of what you see. This is what I'm seeing. A few exposed back faces (blue) but no problem working in the model. [image: 1763125116883-glitching.gif]