There a lot of choices out there, as you know. All renderers have their lighting and material systems which are generally not compatible with those of the other renderers. This makes it difficult to learn and evaluate very many of them. If you are looking for suggestions - Don't waste too much time setting up materials in SU. I use Twilight and am happy with it's biased/un-biased approach.

Create scenes for each wall elevation, use align view, parallel projection, section planes etc, or any other setup you want, then print the scenes.

The native move toll will do that also. If you start move and then input [x,y,z] it will move absolute, <x,y,z> is locale relative move, [,,z] you keep x,y same and move in z , etc

And for more fun : Components Stringer by Chris Fullmer Advantage: your have 3 possibilities of the size of the Components along the lines: Uniform, Stretch or none! And they follow the "orientation" of the curves - lines! Random Painter always by Chris Fullmer You can of course take also a simple divided line with it! (Right Click on the line / Divide) [image: XYXM_afull.jpg]

Thank you Gabor

Is "centerpoint.rb" key to any particular plugin? I don't know of any plugin I have called "Centerpoint", must be part of another one.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. In the first scene we are also saving the hidden geometry...Normally we don't use hide for anything other than a working tool, but the dialog box seemed like this could be done. Normally we use layers to manage visibility across scenes but in this case the element we are trying to turn off is already on a layer that we are managing the visibility of in other scenes and we didn't want to have to go back and update all scenes...was just wondering if there was a trick to getting an individual scene to save the hidden geometry as the dialog box seems to suggest is possible. Will just add the layers and update all the scenes. Thanks! Chad

It's not to do with resolution; I am running a pair of Thunderbolt displays at 2560 x 1440 each If you look at the screenshot you can see that the OS is anti-alising very well. I was running SU on the built in display before getting the TB displays and it was running very smoothly, with some small issues with tiny snap points and tool tips. I attached a screenshot of the built in display. Interestingly LayOut looks fine! [image: Cxd4_ScreenShot2014-01-14at06.37.46.png]

Thank you Box.

I'll do my best to live up to frighteningly, small children have been known to run screaming from the room at my approach, could be my jokes though. Another tool you may want to look at is shape bender, very handy for making curved ramps and such.

Thanks for that tip. Makes a lot of sense.

@rob d said: I guess I missed the announcement to that. So what gives chaps? I'm not criticizing, though it's quite an unusual move for a forum to make, so I'd like to understand the benefits to me of joining in. Hi Robin, "So what gives", thanks for asking this question in plain language I'm sad to say that very few actually are 'givers' when it comes to participation on the SketchUcation Community. What keeps things afloat are the few that actually give 100%+, the Moderators, Top SketchUcators, Ruby Developers, regularly Contributing Members also Management and of course our valued Sponsors. Premium Membership has been introduced as a means for members that wish to support SketchUcation but do not have the time to make 'time / support' contributions. In return they get free content and discounts that far outweigh the cost of their support contributions. Also they are offered the opportunity to sell their content / services via the SketchUcation Shop system. I trust these few lines explain matters. We are also 'all ears' should anyone have a better solution for keeping SketchUcation afloat and thriving. Mike

Can't really get it working with errors. Just took S Shepherds test to use it in my project for the moment. Thanks!

I'm using a Razer Naga 2012 and I'm verry happy with it, all the buttons have a function in skecthup, the lowwer numbers are the ones that I use the most. For a 2 handed person is it a dream to use this in combination with a spacenavigator.

When talking about BIM you need to ask yourself what you're looking for. Take the words "Building Information Modeling"- What does it mean? It means Information about a Building through [the interface of] a Model. By that definition, SketchUp is BIM software. Software companies like to confuse the issue when talking about features of their software, such as parametric modeling, room areas, scheduling, etc. They give the strong impression that anything else is not BIM. This is total deception. Don't get me wrong, these features are hugely advantageous for massive greenfield modular projects, but where one-off buildings are concerned you need to seriously question the return on investment where your platform requires you to create bespoke parametric elements for every single object in the model. How is SketchUp BIM? Surfaces contain area data. Groups & Components contain volume data. Objects can be programmed (including parametric and other features) SU exports data to spreadsheets. SU supports energy analysis, cost analysis SU Pro creates construction documents (when you know how- Nick is a great exponent of this process) There are a vast and growing number of automated plugins for ease and speed of virtual construction (e.g. 1001bit tools, Buildedge, etc.) SU files are now accepted by Tekla BIMsight. SU interacts very nicely with Google Earth. There are several add-ons for rendering SU models. I don't know what your requirements are and maybe you are right to go for the above packages- but I just question the need for parametric-only software for bespoke limited/ one-off building design & construction.

I'll will take a look, thanks Chris.

The T100 was primarily for my wife so she doesn't hog my PC. Putting SU on it was for when we travel and then I can keep my brain and fingers active. Can't do SU on my Blackberry phone. As for the T100 small screen, well, my PC is a dual screen (24in primary, 19in secondary). I keep most dialogs (materials, components and layers) active on #2 and only toolbars and Entity Info on #1. That gives me a huge work area. Dual screens also allow me to keep an Excel spreadsheet open on #2 when I am doing calculations and other stuff. Sorta gotten used to that so a postcard screen was a shock. I knew it would be small, but did not expect that to be so intrusive on using SU effectively, till I tried it. I also have a USB 4 port hub attached to the single USB3 port on the T100. To that hub I attach a tiny USB mouse and my USB Thumbdrive for PC <-> T100 files transfer. The T100 also has a micro HDMI port, which I have yet to try.

As a start. [image: xAS4_asastart.png]

@rdx007 said: Hi all, I have a skp file which displays different parts of a design using layer manager. I want to make a form with drop down boxes in webdialog which is user friendly and performs the same function as layer manager . Is it possible to do so? If yes please let me know how go about it . There are numerous plugins that do things such as you seek. Search the Extension Warehouse and the sketchUcation plugin store for "layer". Steve

Just remember if you use two different versions of a material (horizontal and vertical), you increase the file size and potentially reduce performance and speed. If you have to edit the materials, you have to edit them both. You waste even more time that way. Applying and aligning a material isn't at all difficult to do in the model and once you've set it to each required orientation, you just sample the needed orientation when applying the material to other faces. Still, as with most other things in SketchUp, you can choose how you want to invest your time and how much to invest.