@hellnbak said: Well, I gave it a try. Exported it at higher resolution with anti-aliasing turned off, and it really looked bad. the fence and tower were all screwed up..... I should have said you need to export at least 4x the desired resolution if you have AA turned off, 6 or 8x is better. (and png format is preferable - jpg has pretty awful compression from SU) Glad you figured out your video card settings, much simpler solution

This problem has been driving me nuts for years, in my largest models it was impossible to right click and delete materials from the SU Material Editor. A real pain when SU automatically creates solid colour materials for imported dwgs. Digitalmarley's trick above works! I had to change my Windows 7 theme to Classic (Basic didn't work), and SU stills hangs for about 20 seconds (for each material!), but finally the right click context menu comes up and I can choose delete. Thank you Digitalmarley! Trimble really need to sort out how SU handles materials, it's a terrible bottleneck. /Jackson

The OpenGL settings unfortunately didn't really help. Just as I figured, a style change might be the best thing available currently. I whipped up some styles for my main template and a few plugins that switch between a normal display mode and some construction modes, that's gonna have to do I guess.

Ah! The first thing I did was start to filter by author but did not look further than E

"So for you example above, one way is." I found out what I did wrong when selecting the section underneath. Now I only had to delete a couple of lines.

the type of component that would explode to form a solid would be one that cuts an opening. So pin pointing those particular components and their influence to explode would be necessary before outer shelling. Using the outliner and selecting, right click exploding would be the quickest. Grouping and naming such geometry would help (you would have to pass the required attributes through of course). like plates with a set of holes would be grouped to Ax_"name" like Ax_plate1, Ax_plate2....so easy to reference the "A" would be a place holder, "x" for explode I believe you would need some kind of naming convention, for a ruby script to seek out and destroy once you have establish a simple method, then you can build a ruby script, or course with help from the gurus. EDIT: just realised that nesting down more than one level is causing your problem as you wrote, However the same principle applies.... use outliner, open(+) to require nested group, can use control to select more than one,right click to context menu....explode

I suppose whoever made them did that. Maybe the extra layer came in from some other app that was used to draw draw them in the same way layers come in from CAD files when they are imported. If you don't want the added layer, I guess you can get rid of it.

unscientific observation regarding the poll: people who were voting in the wee hours EST (1-3a.m.) tend to use emoticons/netspeak.. (the vote was 6to1 at one point) now that we're in 'normal' hours, the vote is leveling out.

@tspco said: I tried turning off the hardware acceleration with 2014, no difference. Yes I can post a skp give me a few Maybe you didn't restart SketchUp at first, thus no changes in the behavior. Once you restarted the program (at certain time) you'd notice changes from turning off 'Use hardware acceleration. Just a guess. To see if this is true, enable 'Use hardware acceleration' again and restart SketchUp. Do you have the same display issue again? If so, find another driver for your graphics card to better support OpenGL. Why? You do want to benefit working with that card (and not just the CPU) to run SketchUp at full speed.

It sounds to me as if you're drawing the B-spline across other lines. those lines would automatically split the B-spline and those lines would prevent weld from welding the spline back together. If you make groups or components of the other lines, you can prevent the B-spline from being split. If you need parts of the B-spline to be inside those groups/components, there are simple ways to do that but I'd want to see an example of model before going into it.

Thanks very much for the replies, most helpful! A

If you need to convert formats in the future, try using a service called Convertio.co. It's free and easy to use.

Much prefer the older version, the new interactive version just fights against me all the time!

Perfect! Could it be any easier. Thanks.

There are several plugins to join [or aka 'weld'] lines, curves, arcs etc into a single bound 'curve' object, these can then be used in processes, like those in some of my Extrude Tools... My own version is available in the PluginStore. http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=TIG-weld Preselect a set of connected edges/curves, run the 'weld' tool from the Tools menu item, or setup/use a shortcut key-press... and then it should make a welded curve - but remember there can be no intervening 'branch' edges as these will split the curve where they touch it...

Thank you for the assistance! I think its been you answering all my questions over the course of this year. I greatly appreciate your time and effort.

@calypsoart said: I have the SU export setting options set to "best quality," with anti-alising and Use View size. The "Use View size" setting exports a screenshot of your model exactly as it is visible on your computer screen. In most cases this is too coarse for printing on paper. For good-looking colour prints, you will need a resolution of about 150 - 300 pixels per inch for the print not to look too jaggy. The recipe to achieve the best print quality images exported from SketchUp is to first export a larger image than you need (about 2x is a good estimate) with antialiasing turned off (faster and more reliable), and then to resize the image in Photoshop (or your image editor of choice). This gives you much better looking lines than the antialiasing in SketchUp can produce. Anssi

No problem... He says he knows some home designers. Is the work structural? or interior?

Haha, yea interiors are a killer! But then, I try to do what I can to reduce render time - there are lots of things you can do to try and minimise this, like not using full RGB levels (white for example, I use 230 RGB and not 255). I try to keep reflective surfaces to a minimum and restrict the number of individual emitters (using multi-light and having a lot of emitter settings increases render time) but sometimes this isn't possible. On average, for an interior that has many different textures/reflective surfaces and emitters (and individual components), it's approx £20 to render 1 image to 20 SL. Anita

Probably the best solution until Sketchup are able to update or give an alternative set of options; would be to plug in to a extra monitor. I find it quite convenient to run two and move my laptop between office and home