@unknownuser said: For whatever reason some of my materials have been renamed. The names show up correctly when I hover over them, but when I select them the names have been changed. In my greys this has happened to four of them. I think you have those four materials already in the model, but you just somehow renamed them. Because if you have a renamed color in the model, when you hover over the color in the colors palette the name you see is the "original one", but when you click on it you see the name you assigned to that color in the model. This happens with all the materials. You can also spot that noticing the little white triangle on the icons.

As long as you know what you do you can combine those hiding possibilities as you like.

I have no real info - it is not documented - but would guess in some temp directory.

@hellnbak said: I followed your instructions and it seems to be working fine now. Not sure why it stopped working before. Although I suspect your advice about designing the component on a face and not on a group or component may have something to do with it. When you create a component, pay attention to the various option boxes in the dialog. If you created the component geometry inset on an adjacent face, the "glue to" behavior will get automatically set to "any" unless you set it to "none". Conversely, if you draw on a group or component, the glue to will be set to "none" unless you change it.

I can see both sides here. Likewise I find no problem myself in moving objects around to fit, or align with others using the various ref points that show up; however I have many customers who want to use sketchup, but are used to using AutoCAD or similar. In my experience snap references are biggest omission in SU world, and I struggle to change users over. They want to take my library, and insert products in precise locations easily, and perhaps with an orientation reference. Our product is very like meccano, or furniture, and could really benefit from this. I remember when I started SketchUp I had to purge my mind of most other CAD preconceptions; in here we all know that was the best move we ever made, but we have to convince the rest !

Have you got the second building textured with PNG materials. Have those PNG images transparency even if the part visible is opaque? If so, that may be your problem. If not, check styles, face settings, transparency (fast, normal, nicer) If not, check rendering settings under preferences, OpenGL.

Very surprised but happy to say. this time it only took 2 days! Hurray.

Have you ever clicked on a single face with a texture applied with the right button? Texture position? Right click on texture position while working with it and hit Reset position. It will reset scale and rotation.

I solved the problem and perhaps this will help others. Call the Keymark office in Boulder. They will take your credit card info over the phone and then once cleared, the tech support folks will send you the authorization code by email. Some additional info They are still working on BuildEdge and hope to release something next year.Although dont know what that means. Sketchucation is the site to find any updates. You can install it on two machines but you have to shut down one before you can start the other. So one machine in the office and one at home is ok povided you remember to shut down one before starting the other. Too complicated so I bought a second copy and dont have to remember to shut down before I go home.

Guys, you were both spot on! Dave: Magenta is indeed low. TIG: Trying to print black lines via an image editor in grayscale mode (applied both to the image and printer settings) didn't print anything. After a bit of fiddling with the printer's settings I realized that, trying to make the lines print in a fine resolution, I selected the printer's "Text & Image" print quality. That was the problem. Changing the print quality to just "Text" made it possible to print the lines in grayscale mode with no color involved. Thanks a lot folks!

@jenujacob said: Maybe its just me... Perhaps they made it so that it would tax your system resources only when u really need them.. Makes sense if think like that! Sent from my LG-D855 using Tapatalk That is indeed the intention, you build the scene based on settings that ensure fast lag free navigation, you then set up the animation and then you add all the filters/features you need, some even come with real-time on/off switches in case your GPU cannot handle it, which you only switch on in final render mode if that is the case. The ideal solution is to have a 5th or 6th generation i7 and a decent GPU with at least 6Gb ram for it all to work smooth in real time.

Another idea.... As you build your model work out the various sub structures as components. Example - wings, nose section, main fuselage, tail section etc. Assign each sub structure to it's own layer. When you want to work on a particular assembly , turn off layers for the other parts.

have you tried Texture Resizer? http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=360679#p360679 john

use for lenz attribute LenZ =current("lenz") it will adjust first then become stable make X,y adjust to position, you have them set at a value, delete the = with Z, you could create a option to change its value or use =current("z")

Yep, I use that plugin as well. For trees.

I'm sure it can be done in Blender, but I have no experience of that. You might also try out Sculptris. That looks pretty useful for organic modelling. It's going to be pretty high-poly though. http://pixologic.com/sculptris/ More useful might be the free open-source subdivision modeller Wings3D http://www.wings3d.com/ As for SketchUp, I can't think of any free smoothing plugin to get that final smooth effect, but Joint Push Pull is free/donate. To subdivide the mesh, it is possible to use the free Fractal Erode plugin with iterations set to 1 and the pointyness set to 0

my mirror tool shortcut is "M", i use it all the time But yes it is another good way to do it. Mirror tool + 3 points (sometimes not easy with complex models and the inference engine) vs copy/paste in place + select both instances + flip along + select one and delete it i'm still voting for a combined flip tool

From 2004 to 2006 my job was just what you are asking for: making 3d city models. Our workflow back then was (in 3dsMax): start with some sort of planning / script so you know what needs to be in 3d, what can be a billboard/panel and what can be skipped. Edit: there's a big difference in a walkthrough model and a birdseye view model. get the contours of the houses (2d dxf city data) -> maybe OpenStreetmap? take photographs yourself of all the buildings you need to model roughly model the shape of a building by doing: 4a. model a shape using the 2d city data (contours, streets etc). The 2d city data helps here because now you have the contour and exact width of the individual buildings 4b. Add a texture to the facade. Scale(z) the facade with the texture so its proportions are just like in the photographs 4c. add all the 3d details that define the building (overhangs, chimneys etc) 4d. use some sort of hierarchy in the model Name your models and textures so you can easily find something. 4e. edit the textures in Gimp/Photoshop to remove perspective in the windows, people, bicycles etc. Back then we used a constant TexturePerMeter for the textures so all the textures had the same sharpness / blur. Because of the limitations of hardware we used 32 pixels per meter. With the modern graphic cards you can go much higher for the curbs and roads we used a lofting technique with tileable textures you really need trees, streetlights, streesigns, cars, decals etc etc to make it come alive This is a very very very brief explanation. Feel free to ask more specific questions. Edit: if you brief allows you to keep all the buildings white instead of textured, you will save a TON of work. Edit: added a picture of some of our projects in 2004-2006 edit: think about a consistent level of detail. Max [image: f0OZ_city3d.jpg]

Revit will never be Sketchup, you got that one right for sure. Sketchup starts as a simple and intuitive software. However Sketchup could eventually be a Revit competitor. That is only a matter of wanting to deveop the right plugin. Plusspec claims something along this line right? (Not quite there probably, I wouldn't know.) I believe it would be a matter of choice for the trimble team, but I bet they prefer to keep SU within a wider scope as a modeller, than try pursuing Revit...

Actually, Trimble recommends that you don't just copy the plugins folder from one installation to another; you should install them properly. In any case, some extensions (like certain renderers) will install themselves into their own program folders...just putting a loader rb into Plugins. You won't have that program folder on a new system; plus you may have more than one Plugins folder. The default for 64bit versions is in Users/AppData..... but there's often another one in Application Data. It depends on what you've installed. I would recommend making a list of all your current plugins and extensions then installing them one by one using the Sketchucation Plugin Store (rapidly evolving into the Extension Store) plugin. This will create a Bundle that you can then rapidly copy to any other SU installation. As for the toolbar arrangement, I've made a screenshot of my preferred layout. I just import this as an image into SU, Zoom to fit, then arrange all the toolbars to match it. Also don't forget any custom templates, material libraries, styles etc. They'll need to be ported-over too. I'm currently running SU on 3 different systems. I just use it on 1 system at a time. It's likely that the latest release of SU will be out shortly. It's also possible that it may need a clean install...ie uninstalling the old version first, so having a bundled version of up-to-date plugins that can be installed with a single click will probably prove more economic in the long term. Like everybody else, I used to just copy-over my old plugins folder, but you can end up with a whole bunch of outdated plugins that way....except for Fredo's, which have a checking gizmo. You can also end-up with several plugs all doing effectively the same thing. I've just installed on a new laptop; and I took the opportunity to make a fresh start. The point about the SCF Plugin Store installer is that it will automatically install the latest versions directly from here, rather than copying some old version that's been knocking around on your hard drive for years.