I need to reiterate.......the software needs to be revised so the materials palette pops open when the paint tool is activated - like it used to do.

No, not yet. Summer has driven me adrift. It is still in the back of my mind thought.

Hi Guys out of the office yesterday, many thanks for all your comments and assistance, invaluable as ever.

Hi Bob, Probably the quickest way to accomplish this, without extensive use of plugins, is to control your camera location/movement through scenes. This precludes the need to manipulate the model in any way. For example, you could draw a hexagon that encloses your entire model, with one vertex lined up with the front view. Then you could place your camera on the front vertical of the hexagon. Use guide points to try different elevations until you get one that frames your model correctly. Now adjust the height of the hexagon to match the perfect height. Re-place your camera on the front vertex, making sure that you are in the front view, and save the scene. Now place your camera on the next vertex and repeat the process and save a scene. (you can control your camera even more if you make an alignment face for each vertex that is perpendicular to the plane of the camera view at the vertex and use that to align the camera after you place it on the vertex. This might be more control than you actually need and "fudging" the camera location to better frame the model in each location is a valid method too. Once you have all the vertex views saved as scenes, run the animation. You may need to zoom in or out slightly, at each scene, to keep from clipping the model as the camera moves. Keep refreshing the scenes as you dial in the flow. It sounds more complicated than it is and you will find that you can "fake" an object-based animation pretty easily.

Nothing, eh? Well, that's ok, I solved it myself.

@pritam8888 said: Hi, is there a plugin to create smooth sketchup video from scenes ? Look at: Smutard's Presentation Bundle 2 D. Bur's ScenesTool (Extension Warehouse)

It's slick!

@sdmitch said: Just the type of mindless exercises I live for. Over the weekend, I tried various scenarios and this was the best of them. Created in less than a minute under SU2016 64bit. Usage:Extensions>SDM Tools>Misc Tool>Random Cubes [attachment=1:1at0ardt]<!-- ia1 -->Random Cubes.jpg<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:1at0ardt] Wow! Amazing. Thanks so much for sharing!

Thank you both sdmith and tig. Regards Pedro

Try SketchUV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRXT3vC0mnc

This works. Thanks for the tip!

You can add a layer that is invisible in all other scenes with e.g.: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10%26amp;t=36583#p322291 Or you can have a look at VisMap2 for a more advanced control (haven't tested it): http://www.martinrinehart.com/models/rubies/vismapdoc.html

You can download 12 at a time from the Components dialog "Save as local collection."

Thanks Rich for the video Tig - the premise of this exercise was not to change camera position - aka do not pan/orbit/zoom. But thanks anyway for the good narrative.

Don't know if this can help you? In English with a little French accent of my friend Denis! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o76gaFDLSto

Duh. Thanks guys. Amazing how I always assume things are more difficult then they are.

Thank you Fredo, This is actually helpful for high-resolution windows machines as well. Although some control over the scale value other than 2 would be great as well. Anyways, much better than no scale as all the texts and toolbar are scrambled without.

@gene davis said: I copied the plug in from there and pasted into 2016, and all works fine. You shouldn't do that because there may be incompatibilities between different versions and it's always better to download a fresh and up-to-date version of plugins. (This time you were lucky because 6.0 is the current version in the Pluginstore: http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=Mirror ) (TIG was faster, but for me the answer was more work, so here it is.)

Thank you so much Numerobis and Sdmitch for your time.cheers

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