If can have groups instead of some components it will also be faster. So, for big models "good" modeling practices (I know Dave will kill me now... ) it's better to start off by groups and not components. (Before you kill me Dave) Rich O'Brien made a tree model with all leaves as components and it worked slower... Now I can't find it and I can't be sure if the leaves were pure geometry or groups...

[image: 4DJX_rendera.jpg] Here's an image where you can see that the 4-layer extrusions are easy to do in the flatter areas (e.g. on top of the shell) but they don't work well where there is a lot of curvature. The problem is mainly that you need to extrude along a path with quite variable orientation of the normals.

Sorry, my bad... however if Trimble would want to make it available they would have it there right?

Which version did you go with Joe?

Wow, sounds like an marriage!!

No. There's no plugin to do that. I'm not even sure that it can be done with a plugin. You could create that look by combining a couple of image exports, though. Profiles are displayed around each component or group so if you wanted to show them around the outside only using a single export, you could explode all the components and groups in the model. I'd prefer the two image exports myself.

thx guy's So triangulation was the magic word Both plugins worked. I personally think that toposhaper worked better. It had more options and I'm a big fan of Libfredo plugins.

@Box - Can you see the bright red glow on my face....that short video is what I needed to get me started. I really appreciate it............... OK - Here is a start...... [image: wcQJ_QFT-Glass.png] Wow, the file size it huge. Need to make sure you always have the low poly version available

Thanks i'm trying again

Version of @Box's - but with a solid mesh object [for simplicity, here I used a sphere] cut with a face... [image: iKUF_Capture.PNG]

right on, thanks for the help Dave

Hi! I don't have AutoCAD, but i tested exporting files from Blender and importing them to SketchUp: 48 sides circle: .stl comes out as 24s, but Collada .dae comes out with 48 sides ! [image: o6mn_circleColladaDaeFromBlender.png]

There's something to learn here.

Thanks I must of over looked that

@dcbluemoon said: This tool appears the have great potential. An chance there is a tutorial, as I am have trouble introducing Lat.,Long. values into the model? I think I'm missing something simple. After a quick look, I think you would need to create a text file containing the Lat,Long,Elev data, one point per line, and use the Plugins>Coords Tags>Import Coords Tags from CSV.

@jql said: Nope, nothing's changed. But you might have been using a different style or there might be something you're not aware of and so you're not telling us. Well interesting.......... I just took the 2015 file and opened it again in 2016. I noticed that the style icon had the round arrows on it so I updated the style and WaaaLaaa, it worked. So it was a styles issue all along. Do not know why I did not see that yesterday. Now a couple more interesting things: I do not have any layers or section names associated with the section plane I added the SectionCutFace and was able to set the color of various portions of the section cut.One interesting showed up that I had not seen before when using the SectionCutFace. Of course it showed all of the cuts to the walls and applied a face which I was able to color to match the texture of the walls and floor. Then a new one showed up in that it applied a face with the default color to the entire rest of the building. I then colored that face white and set the opacity to 0. Now a couple of questions: When trying the SectionCutFace plugin before I had not seen that happen. I did do the update of the plugin yesterday. Is this a bug? Even though I got the section cut to work properly today, is this the wrong way to do it? I have seen several other examples and tutorials before where the author (and some of them very advanced authors) did not add a section name and put it on a layer to control the visibility. I suppose (and looking at the parameters of the SectionCutFace plugin) that the best organization is to name the section cut and put it on a layer and control the visibility via the layer. Just trying to understand the best/correct way because I will be using this for some later endeavors.

Thanks everyone, made my colleague happy.. Only Im having trouble keeping the texture on the backside. I used UV toolkit to project the texture to backside...But once I hit 'Cntl S'. it disappears! For me, I did with both Fredo tools and Sketch UV. Cant make the map spread to the edges perfectly.. I guess We need a proper UV unwrap inside SU...

Change in workflow sucks, but as a person involved in the beta testing I can tell you that we test it, make sure it isn't junk and report back. The trays were annoying me initially and now they are part of my workflow. Trimble has done a great job with SketchUp I have to say. Imagine if it went over to Autodesk!!!

Indeed it does work (with the x86 version, oddly). I'm not sure I can share it with you. Maybe you can request it from Trimble, or register as a developer? It's quite easy and fast.

Yes!!, Thanks Box.