@cotty said: You can use the normal inferencing system to position a section cut (middle point, guide lines, ...) and you can fix a direction with the shift button ... Do you have an example image or model where it doesn't snap? Thanks. "Shift button"is the answer. I'd never tried using it while it moving the sec plane.

What textures/materials do you have in the model? Maybe there is a color lookup change happening between the PDF and jpg that is making some material look more yellow? To answer your second question, no, jpg does not always look good to me. In particular, unless I have profiles set to 1 they come out very heavy in the jpg. Like Dave, unless I know the recipient can only handle jpg, I prefer png, uncompressed tiff, or PDF.

@driven said: the whole point of any maintenance update is to deal quickly with reported splats... each release has an overview of the changes, do they reflect a possible correction of your issues? Well I just updated so we'll see. Many of mine were outliner-related: often when trying to change nesting order directly in the outliner. Didn't see anything in a quick scan of the release notes re the outliner, so don't know if this release will prove to be more stable in my case. (Although I have gone back to cutting and pasting in place in the model instead of shuffling groups/components in the outliner. Slower by far, but I got fed up with the splats. Kind of defeats the value of the outliner if you can't trust it for the purpose.) @driven said: After a considerable amount of bug chasing on mac's, I find recurring issues being related to 'plugin observers' and 'Auto Save', so I avoid both whenever possible... To do this I disable many plugins until I actually want to use them, including the SU ones, and any 'renderers'... I normally try to keep the number of enabled plugins in any given session to a minimum, but I realized that I had installed several new ones of late and left them all enabled, so a good reminder to pare it back down. As for the autosave, that's a tough one... and a bit ironic that the feature meant to ameliorate the results of a crash can be responsible for those very splats. I've tried to get in the habit of manual saves, but the more engrossed I am in modelling the less likely I am to remember. I would have lost an awful lot of work this last week if it weren't for the autosave file whittling it down to 5 or 10 minutes of lost work per crash. Thanks for your thoughts and 'best practices'. Doug

Viewport works but: Exist viewport window must NOT be full screen. No special cursor used in Windows just std cursor to tug and pull edges and corners. Thanks to Driven for sharing this nifty thingy. dtr

John, I really appriciate you taking the time to help me out. I'll take your advice to create a material folder inside the "old color" folder in user/library path. thanks, chuck. P.S. - Rich, Thanks again for your input also. you helped me learn some more about checking under the hood and that's always a good thing!

Thanks for the suggestion Jim but screenspace wasn't the problem. It was a windows tablet PC setting (right/left handed) that was causing it.

@rich o brien said: Windows XP. The greatest OS ever. Yeah, I figured that's what you meant, just couldn't understand why you thought it would still be a popular download. Yes, it was a great OS, I still have it on two of my machines (just because of the software I can't run on Win7), but since the security updates stopped it's become very risky to go online with. I was very reluctant to move on to Win7 but so glad I did. It has (IMHO) replaced XP as the greatest OS to date.

it's not more complicated modeling with layers whenyou catch it it's actually easyer and that's why i suppose layers were invented lol. i would strongly reccommend to use layers both in sketchup and in 3dsmax. imho is quite impossible to get a clean, efficient and professional looking model whitout using them. in particular when the size/complexity grows.. aside using proper layers, i would strongly suggest to split the model in smaller pieces and process them one by one, because at the end it is faster than tryng to import "mammouth" models from sketchup to max. i think that's the way you can take the most of the advantages out of both the softwares, because you can model way faster in sketchup and assemble more large enviroments in max.. i think for a proper workflow is best to use each application for his intended job.. (and use layers/selection sets/proper naming of course that all helps)

As a side note, displays with high-dpi have started emerging on Windows recently as well. We all need to keep up the pressure on Trimble to find ways to deal better with these new displays. But, I don't expect anything before SU 2016 regardless, so in the meantime we must do things like John suggests or just cope with the tiny display of items.

@calypsoart said: Duh! I feel like an idiot. That's how files get ordered and so many things. I think I've been looking at this screen for too long. A walk is in order. When you recover from your massive "duh" (welcome to the club), Calstock's advice is still very good.

I like a bright magenta for my highlighting.

Hi ! The curves you have created are too heavy, meaning there are too many segments. Do you have an untouched model? With no rounding done on it? I too believe you are asking the plugin a bit too much, especially with so many segments.Not really the plugin, but when you give Sketchup that much to chew, things might get unstable. You could try to divide the surfaces where there are straight lines and run the plugin twice or more for each surface.

Glad to help, Doug. Sometimes it's just asking the right question that gets it all sorted.

Well Well, calstock! Thanks for specifying that here. It turns out i have always typed in "x10" to make multiple copies not knowing that "10x" will work the same way. AWESOME! BTW, decided to look for a utility to PRINT my shortcuts and found this old one. works well. plan to pay more attention and make more shortcuts. printkeys.rb https://sites.google.com/site/jimfoltz/my-sketchup-plugins/print-shortcuts

Just draw that line and the surface will close. [image: xwfj_stairtesta.jpg]

Seems to be a known problem when applying custom mapping / using SketchUV. Dale (Whaat) even posted a workflow for it but I can't seem to get it to work: http://artisan4sketchup.com/manual/sketchuv/lessons/Auxillary_Tools_-_Path_Select_and_Triangulate.html create object apply material with texture export UV's (obj) using SketchUV to third party program (Blender for instance) apply UV's in third party program, export as obj import UV's using SketchUV apply 'triangulate' in SketchUV export as fbx this workflow still generates multiple materials and textures. I must be missing something. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for the help

@jim said: Ugh, it's getting turned back on whenever I add a scene via Ruby. see that on mac, as well... turn them off add a page seems to work until the page 'refresh' john

@fordwaters said: ...changed some settings for read & write capabilities under the Sketchup application folder. I doubt that will help at all... SU doesn't write AutoSave's into the .app folder, by default unsaved models go into the 'AutoSave' folder... Sketchup.find_support_files("","AutoSave") which for me returns ["/Users/johns_iMac/Library/Application Support/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/AutoSave/.DS_Store"] as mine is empty [by choice]... Once you 'Save' or 'Save As' a file, it's new 'AutoSave' saves to the same folder as the new skp. the one for 'Untitled' stays in the folder, but it is then a dead link, that won't open... To clarify your issue... 1: You are 'AutoSaving' an 'Untitled' drawing 2: you then name by using 'Save' or 'Save As'? 3: after this manual save, you get the 'Failed to save file' error, at the pre-set time limit... I can replicate this only if I Lock the folder after I first save it, or manually move it from my user folder... but then I am unable to 'Save' without the same warning... Are you running as 'root/admin'? as that's the only way I can see how you can get this issue... as 'root' you can save to anywhere you like without 'error' messages, but SU can't write to the same scope as 'root' so 'AutoSave' would fail... john

Cotty, Thank you!! You are a gentleman and a scholar! I was able to reproduce your excellent results. This has, with your help, suddenly become a great day. Cheers, Jeff