That did it! Thanks a lot for the heads up. I didn't realise Sketchup had made a secondary folder elsewhere. Noted for next time! Cheers.

<facepalm> It works. Don't know why I never thought of that. Must be one of those days!! Thanks TIG

In the "real world" it is a matter of your understanding with whomever you are providing the designs to. I don't know that there is any generally accepted practice. I'm sure it depends on whether your client is adequately knowledgeable about SketchUp. It also depends on the form in which your user expects to receive the model. You may have to convert it to something else, such as stl, before you send it on. In that case is it your problem to decide how your objects were meant. Unless you annotate the model or provide separate documentation of your intent, someone using the model will have to provide their own interpretation. As noted, for some cases you can protect yourself by modeling at finer granularity (smaller Edges) than you know the user will require. Of course, this causes the model to have a very high Entity count. You are faced with a fundamental aspect of SketchUp's design: it might be termed WYSIAYG (what you see is all you've got). In some other applications, an object is defined in an abstract mathematical form (e.g. center location, normal vector, and radius for a 3D circle) and is converted to line segments when and as needed. For instance, when rendered to the display, a circle needs to be converted to a raster image with pixels appropriate to the resolution of the display. On a different display, a different raster representation will be generated. In SketchUp, there is no such higher-order abstract model. The Edges and Faces representing a shape are all there is. OK - picky point - a sequence of Edges can be joined together to form a polyline or polygon, but there is still no abstract model of the polygon as such. So, for a circle, a user needs to know how to find the center and measure from there to a vertex to discover the original as-drawn radius. If it really matters and they don't have the SketchUp expertise to do this, you will have to do it for them and annotate the model. This whole thing is a fundamental aspect of SketchUp's internal design, and part of how it obtains its much-treasured interactive user interface. Changing to the abstract-model-rendered-when-needed paradigm would be an end-to-end redesign of all the basic mechanisms of SketchUp. Steve

Oops somebody got to it while I was typing... Box is right though. Use the sketchucation plugin installer.

@ntxdave said: @tk0001 said: Dave, I think the technique I used here would work well for you, as long as the views are relatively close to the camera. The further you pull away, the more the dark edges jumble up the background "unhighlighted" information. The model I'm working on is of a facility that is rather large, so I want to try to dampen the background stuff as much as possible. What I really wanted to do was replicate the view SketchUp gives when you double click on a group, but with transparency in the surrounding information. I'm close. Hopefully I can get there. Yes, it probably would however, that means all of my groups would have to be duplicated plus there is the camera distance issue. The car wash runs anywhere from 135' to 155' long. Therefore, the lines could be an issue. My other point is that everything is centered around presenting in a paper driven environment (which I fully understand since a one of the primary uses is for the builders and etc.). However, today's environment also needs to be a little more multimedia focused as well. As you described about the monitor, we also present our proposed layouts from time to time with touch screen monitors. One of my dreams would be somewhat similar to what you were describing/wanting. It would be really neat if I could bring up one of my models/layouts, double click on a piece of equipment (component/group) and have it highlighted or the rest of the equipment hidden (like double-clicking on a group). I have looked at some presentation tools that support 3D models but they do not give me the capability to "cycle through" the various pieces of equipment in my model/layout. Guess I am just living in a dream world Wish I was a good enough coder to go off and develop something on my own. Good luck in your pursuit, Dave. Hopefully an adequate solution will be presented in this thread one of these days. FYI, to give you some perspective, if you refer to the "Highlighted" image above, the outside dimension of the blue highlighted equipment is about 300'.

Make hundreds if you wish.

Somewhere along the line you ought to be able to get someone to export so the dimensions are correct when imported into SketchUp. If not, can you get one of the other file types that SketchUp will import? Then you should be able to click on Options and set the correct units. It wouldn't hurt to see if you can get cleaner models to import, too.

@unknownuser said: I love Apple and own all the mobile devices, an iMac and several Mac Pros for my home, but in the pipeline for my work…there isn’t one Mac. It can’t run Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Fume FX, or CUDA so I’m still waiting. I hope that in the future Apple will remedy this situation so that a Mac Pro can be found everywhere without any limitations. —- AKIKO ASHLEY That pretty much sums it up for me. It would be a no-brainer if the thing had even moderately good Nvidia cards in it. It's so frustrating that Apple (and almost everyone else) views 'Pro' consumers as video editors. I'm a pro; I make a living sitting in front of many many pixels creating stuff, stuff that actually gets built into real things. The conclusion my better half (who's machine would shame anyone* on here) and I came to is that I buy another Retina Macbook Pro and build a monster powerful PC to use as a render slave. *I dare you step up to her hardware

Found it. In case anyone else wonders it's accessed via the Styles Panel: Edit->Modeling (furthest tab to the right).

Congratulations!

My apologies, and fear not I'll never darken your threads again.

...and there it is. Always nice when someone points you in the right direction. Thanks!

@pbacot said: This is what I mean, in the attached image. But I see what is going on with the texture now. Try using ThruPaint. Makes things easier. +1

Uh, that's because you can't make a two column toolbar. If you had actually read what I wrote, you'd have seen I covered that.

an image would help to understand the problem did you try to use a higher resolution for the export?

Welcome to the forum! You should have a look at your dot key, it might be broken...

Or Jims Map Sun?

I manged to get it to work. My revit model had other revit files linked into it that hadn't been bound, once bound and un grouped they exported fine. Thanks for your help though.

@box said: With Profile builder create the profile of the paint line then select all the lines you want to be those paint lines and use the Build along path (follow me)option. It will say I can't find a path do you want individual ones, say yes and it will do it for you no matter how long the lines are or at what angle. i will try this, thank you! It worked- thank YOU!!

Also depending on your structure and the actual results you want you could use a section plane or change the view to top and use parallel projection.