I found the problem: menu SETTINGS>PREFERENCIES and there OPEN_GL and there choose setting with SHADOWS YES. http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=44020&p=392583&hilit=shadows+faces#p392583

Wow that has grown since my previous installation! Thanks for the pointer Rich and Thomas for programming.

You can add this to the Duhduh thread!

@dave r said: John, what makes you think it'll soon be a lost art? I don't think this generation appreciates it enough, that's all. You are an artist and I can see the love you put into it. Much like my family, it wasn't always about money. Interesting side note. When my grandfather came from italy, he worked for a wealthy man carving and installing molding for his mansion in NJ. It's now the Police Headquaters for the Palisades Intersate Parkway. Amazing to see the work that was done back then.

I think root has more access than admin but I'm not sure. In the meantime the problem is solved, though the mystery remains. I used Super Duper to copy a cloned backup of my old computer over to the new one and all seems normal. Thanks for all the suggestions and help.

Yep your right. Thanks for your help.

Thank you Dave! That sorted it, I turned off geo-location exploded the component, recreated it and saved. Thanks again.

Did you install the required LibFredo? It's linked in the description of the plugin.

Thank you guys about advices I will try disable most non-used plugins and I will you keep informed with my crashes.

Well, I ripped out all the Fredo related plugins and all their relevant bits, then re-inserted freshly downloaded versions; lo and behold, it works! I'm confused as to why, because as far as I can tell, the plugins' file path structure is exactly the same as before. In any case, thank you everyone for your help!

Try using the Plugin/Extension Manager to disable them. http://sketchucation.com/resources/pluginstore?pln=SketchUcationTools

@valerostudio said: ++1 on Vali script. You can use scripts in Free SketchUp, can't you? Well worth the price of $26 I have to tell you. Think about it, if its takes you 3 hours of your billable time to figure this out, isn't it worth it? This plugin has saved me hours upon hours of fence and railing modeling and I have only owned it for a couple of months. I was going to say. Not sure if there's a style for what you want, but if there is-- at those prices it's a question do they want to buy the SW or have you spend more hours? In the right instance VA tools eliminate a lot of tedious time drawing.

Hi Dave, That worked!Thanks a lot!Should have thought of that... any way on a side note.. is there a way for us 64bit users to get back the skp file preview in win explorer back yet? I wont go off-topic again

Ah! OK! seems to work now. Thank you so much!

Hi Carlo, Kim had it correct. 3dsmax needs to update their importers to read the SU 2013 file format. You can contact them directly to find out what their timeframe is for making that update. Thanks, Chris

Hello, the Preferences.dat file is something that only exists if you export it first. So if you didn't export it, it won't be there. But if you kept your old windows installation, did SU open with all its shortcuts in place? If you didn't delete the SU 8 registry, it might have been able to keep its shortcut keys.

SketchUp 2013 requires a license file no matter whether you have the Pro version (license file contains Pro license key) or the free "Make" version (contains agreement for non-commercial use). While SketchUp 8 tried to make the executables more different to prevent licensing problems, they reverted that and made the executables almost identical, introducing a lot of new problems under certain circumstances (Make turns itself into expired Pro, refuses to run more than 1 instance, or refuses to run as "portable" app). I assume the above problem was due to user/admin priviledges (in an ideal world, programs would absolutely never request you to run as admin). Strangely the license file is sometimes located at different places, like Users/Public/AppData/SketchUp/SketchUp 2013/SketchUp13.lf which is writeable with simple user privileges. Maybe SketchUp will also find it when you move it there?

Thanks for the replies. I worked out what the issue was in the end. The camera was coming through in the right position and focal length. However, when I changed the size of the render window to match the photograph the focal length of the camera changed. So after fixing the size of the render I went back and changed the focal length back to the original value and it worked perfectly. Thanks again for your replies. Andy

Kristoff's question is good. Did you just recently update the graphics drivers? It isn't unheard of that an update to the graphics drivers causes problems. What have you changed on the computer recently? Did you install any new plugins? If SketchUp 8 has been working fine for years it isn't likely to be a problem with the program but rather something else causing the problem.

It's probably using a sledgehammer to crack a nut but check out Kirill's LSS Toolbar, first image shows face to face via a path which should work: https://googledrive.com/host/0Bwmt-Rax8alUNkFEMjZkOWhfRFU/index.html, also http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=47399&p=426612&hilit=kirill#p426612 and it would appear to be version 8 I won't be upgrading any time soon either; the tide of rage from the early adopters makes me wary.