ahe thats it Gaieus, thats the topic i was thinking about and I forgot that it was more of a service you pay for and thats why I never used it. At least now I dont have to pull my hair out trying to find it. Im gonna try a few of the suggestions and see how that turns out. Thanks guys.

already a thread available

Hidden geometry will soon (and often) be your friend. I even have a shortcut for it.

well the bottom is not rounded..only the edges are rounded...but u had the top correct but the roof has to be more stood up...u might wanna look at that sleeper more closely...and get a better view of it..but u have thee idea, it needs to be 48" long, and im not sure how wide..like 102-96 inches wide.

Now-a-days I am not having much problem from autoCAD files imported to SU. Things are quite fine. There is also another trick which came from one of the forums - scale the AutoCAD model - say a 100 times. After importing into SU scale down by 100. You may even scale up to 1000 and then scale down in SU. This sorts out quite a lot of problems in curved surfaces. Also i have tried scaling up by 500 and then export as 3ds with Autosmooth turned off. Then import it in SU and scale down. Use the smoothing option in SU . This way it will be possible to pick the entire surface to apply texture. With best regards PRSS

Open the Model - SKP file. Open the Materials Browser window. Pick the Model tab [little house symbol] Click on the icon of the Material you want to extract. Right-click context-menu gives you options - Save_As... Save as a SKM file with its name - into the Materials folder - I suggest you make a sub-folder for these extracted materials so they are easy to find and manage later on... That Material is now saved as a SUp SKM format file that you can access in any other Model, through the Materials Browser by navigating to the appropriate sub-folder in the Materials folder collection... Repeat this for any Material you want to extract from the Model. You can extract materials from any model and save them in this way as SKM files so that they are re-usable in any other model... If you had picked 'Export Texture Image' instead of 'Save_As' then you wouldn't have got a SKM file saved, you'd get a JPG or PNG file - i.e. the image that the material uses as a texture, extracted back into its original form. There is a Ruby script [fast_tw.rb] that will extract all of a model's texture-images into the model's folder - unfortunately there is no equivalent to bulk extract SKMs. The SKM file is a sort of zip file containing the image, its thumbnail and 3 other xlm documents giving colour data etc... To see this, copy a .SKM to your desktop and change its suffix to .ZIP, now open it in your ZIP-application and you'll see the contents listed. No one has yet worked out how to auto-write all of the model's SKMs out of SUp with Ruby... it will happen. Using pop-out 'Save Library As...' lets you bulk export ALL of the model's SKMs into a new folder...

my biggest gripe with OUtliner is with nested components and being able to hide rest of model, but still reveal the parent of the nested group/component being edited. That seems to me a very easy thing to do, and I mentioned it here a lot, but it doesnt get a lot of play. I guess it's just me. D

There's a couple of good introductory videos on youtube which cover the basics well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LcLPPz0fWM

Dear William, Many thanks for the additional information. Now, back to those tutorials.... Regards, Bob

Yeah, it may depend on the rendering program perhaps. I downsized the pixel size (keeping the ratio the same) for my wood flooring for the bedroom render challenge over in the gallery. It ended up coming into Maxwell too large or small (don't recall) so I had to resize it in Maxwell. The workflow sounds a bit easier with maxwell if I understand you. SU just tells Maxwell what material to use so you can have totally different maps. The only reason you use the same image is so that it will translate the UV mapping properly. So I just downsize the map and use it in SU but that maxwell material that it corresponds to will have the full res version.

Thanks Honolulu, I thought Win Movie maker wasn't that sophisticated when I first looked at it, I will take another look definitely. Thanks for the advice. Stan

If I'm making a model to be used in SU only or shared then I am weary about sizes and model using symmetry and groups, if I intend to export it to another app for compiling and render then I model as I please with no regard for size as no matter how I model in SU, most if not all 3rd party apps do not recognise SU groups or components so why waste time being conservative.

Well,when I needed to export to 3ds, we were to retexture everything there so I could go with the SU exporter with welded vertices and just show the SU material as a rough example. Can I say I am lucky? DE is kind of pricy...

@kwistenbiebel said: Frankly, I don't think there is any exporter for any platform that holds SU components. DWG blocks come in as components. And I think they export back as blocks. Max's instances import as SU instances. But a bug in the importer causes only one of the instances to be positioned correctly, and all the rest will be in the same position as the first one.

If you explode the re-imported (reloaded) component in the original but otherwise useless model, it will work as if you'd modelled everything in place there. Your imported component will still be in the model file though but you can easily get rid of it by purging. I do this (in a much smaller scale however - city block vs. individual buildings) but have done it successfully with a whole (Medieval) town and its churches. You can see some shots here. The extent of the model is about 1.3 kilometres / 0.8 miles so there was no such problem however I had performance issues. As for modelling and geolocating, it can be used for GE quite efficiently although you always need to keep in mind that GE is a spherical projection and SU is orthographical so after a while this will cause conflicts. Try it out with a simple, not crucial model first.

AutoCAD files (DWG and DXF) are written in raw 'units' - if mm is used in the dims etc it's an 'overlaid' thing. If you work in m, cm, mm, feet or inches it doesn't matter - since it's all internally consistent. In the UK architects work in mm but surveyors in m - thus you'll have to scale up all site surveys by x1000 ! As Gaieus says you need to tell SUp what units the imported file had assumed under Options. In your case mm. The default is inches - thus your problem. It's also a good idea to ignore the CAD origin as SUp falls over if geometry is miles from the origin. In passing - you could also change the normal/default template you use to a mm metric one. That way whenever you start a new model its units will be set to suit... Open an empty file and set it up as you want and save it into the templates folder. I have my units, dim/style, text/font, location/north, layers, scenes, styles etc all set up so it's one less thing to think about while modelling...

?? I might be completely out of touch on this one... cuz I thought you can always print to scale as long as you follow few "musts", no matter which direction your facade is facing. Correct me if I'm wrong. Turn on parallel projection Go to [File]-[Document Setup], uncheck [Fit View to Page], set [Print Scale] to your preferences. Right click any face in your model that's parallel to drawing sheet, select [Align View] from context menu. [File]-[Print], set preferences and PRINT. Printed sheet should be in the scale you set in {Document Setup]... No?

It's in the plans to make a Camera plugin. Object representing the Scene tabs (selectable off course) with extra tools and dialogs to visually control them. But I need help to understand how cameras work when I begin on this.

thanks chris

Dear Joe, I seemed to have missed a few replies to requests, and yours was one. Many thanks for the changes. Kind regards, Bob