What sort of animation do you want ? http://vimeo.com/802540 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ViozCgD-b8 Else Lumion or Lumen RT are more advanced but some pricey! So Blender is the must for no bucks!

Sorry for the bump. took a break and when I came back I realized one material was on the face level while the other was on a group level, applied the material to both faces directly and they aligned. maybe this will help someone else. thanks

Approach it another way... Make a solid component 'lump' that has the overall form, but without any 'holes'. Then within another component add smaller solid groups/components that form the removal 'holes' - use Xray mode and section-planes to see what you are doing 'inside'. Take care not to overlap or touch these parts, as that will compromise its future 'solidity'. When you are happy with the arrangement explode that container's contents, it should then report as a 'solid' in Entity Info. Then, use the Solid Tools to subtract that from the first 'lump'. You now have the 'framework' as a new solid group... You'll probably need to orient the faces so they are all 'outwards' looking... Save as you go - using components allow you to reuse what was done before, without deep undo's...

Search for the videos from 3d basecamps...

Normally there is some shading unless you are using Hidden Line or Wireframe face styles. Either the shading is based on light coming from the camera or from the sun if you have Use sun for shading. These are used to help create a 3D appearance on the 2D screen. You can eliminate the shading and still have colors by selecting Use sun for shading and crossing the Light and Dark sliders. That is, set the Light slider to the left and the Dark slider to the right. Light from camera [image: m75f_Lightfromcamera.png] Use sun for shading [image: My9v_Usesun.png] Crossed sliders [image: C0CA_crossed.png] It's probably not a good idea to try judging colors from the color patches in the Materials window nor to compare them to what you see in the model space. Color perception is influenced but the surrounding colors so what you see with those little thumbnails isn't likely to match. If you're interested in learning more about this, look up Interaction of Color by Josef Albers.

You probably need to get another post under your belt before attaching the file but then below the message window there's a tab labelled Upload Attachment. It should make sense when you look at it.

Re-import the image as "Use as texture" and then you can position/scale the image. It will only be painted onto the face, so wherever the face ends, it'll end too.

You're not alone in this Frank.

@dave r said: You need to install it correctly first. The best thing to do is get the Sketchucation Plugin Store plugin from the link at the top of the page and install that according to the instructions provided. Then use the Plugin store to download and automatically install plugins you want. [size=150:1hqsuuif]Thank You Mr Richards. That did The Trick[/size]

Cool, thanks for your help.

Sketchup users don't all know eachother. Try using a private investigator, or better yet, commission somebody to make transformers models for you

I'll tell you this. Trimble is not getting the money for Pro out of me until it's 64 bit and multithreading. I am sure I am not alone. Let the market decide if it's quicker and let us find out for ourselves if it will quit crashing on humongous projects instead of feeding us all the reasons it won't be. I'm tired of the thing crashing during every thea render and I don't want to break my projects up into pieces old technology can handle, and I'm tired of excuses, and I'm really tired of script writers who don't want to rewrite their scripts for 64 bit. If music and video programs can do it and Thea Render could do it, sketchup can certainly do it. If not for performance, for mere market appeal.

I think that 'cotation' is used in the sense of 'dimensioning'. One of those -ion words that doesn't translate well from French ! So, you can do it in Layout. In SketchUp you'll need a plugin - see this one... http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=draw_angle_dim

glenn: 2013 ok and 2014 issues does not mean it is a foregone conclusion the problem is 2014 although probability higher. It sounds like 2014 is waiting from some entity to release its operation such that 2014 can complete the close action. This can be caused by virus, autoruns etc. You would be surprised the number of programs running on you machine. Make sure you graphics driver, antivirus definitions are up to date and run scan of your system. If your security software has the option check auto runs(startups) and stop programs you do not need and also run registry scan. I have not seen this issue with my 2014 but using free so Trimble will probably have problem duplicating issue although they should be able to have you run a program to trap failure using some of the System Internals TS tools.

@baz said: It might be several things. Show us a screen shot. Or even post the photo itself? One thing that is pretty important for good results is that the photo should be uncropped. Ideally it should also be undistorted if it shows some lens distortions, because SU does not handle eny distortions. If is heavily distorted it will contain curved lines, which will be impossible to align with the straight red/green lines.

TIG: I have been doing something similar on a component by component basis. The problem is some of my models have 100's of these skewed objects (the example I show is small). Hence, sdmitch has been looking to help solve the problem in mass. The need for doing so is driven by that fact the skewed objects must be detailed in Layout and can not be done so accurately while they are skewed. So the thought was simple...the solution less so. 1.) reset the axis 2.) de-skew 3.) use the Plugin Parts-->Scene 4.) Detail in Layout Step 1 and 2 were taking forever doing them manually so I asked for help in 1.) Asking if I first understood my problem 2.) Seeking alternative existing solutions 3.) finding help in developing a solution for the problem in scale. Seems like sdmitch has a 95% solution. As you can see from his posts, most of the objects are de-skewed with the script he is working on except for nested ones. This is huge and if he solves the last piece it is monumental for me personally. If I had just a few items to contend with I would use the native menu driven solutions. That works fine...but when many model with many items are in this condition the problem is, well...difficult.

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=57831

Thanks a lot...

@sdmitch said: No but I have sent it to you by PM. Got it. It's awesome. Thanks! It's exactly what I had in mind. I'm going to put this to good use.

As far as I know, Sketchup has no relation to Active X, and has never had any relation to it, since the display language used is OpenGL for the program. There may be something else going on there. Probably can't hurt to check your graphics card website for updates. EDIT EDIT EDIT: My apologies. I must have been half asleep. Active X is a Windows operating system feature. I was thinking Direct X. Please disregard this whole reply.