All, thanks for the posts/links. I will look into them.

Selecting problem areas and intersecting faces with models might get you part way there.

If you have the Maxwell plugin, working with proxies is the way to go. Its also very simple. Nothing complicated, just place a component that is linked to a .mxs proxy. See the manual of the plugin. I have done much larger files with proxies, impossible to do any other way. I could render 50 trees (700 Mb each) without much problems sraight from Sketchup. In Sketechup the trees represent just a simple volume. The way we work now is to use Sketchup as a placement tool for Maxwell proxies. The SU files are very responsive and easy to work with. No matter how complicated. What you do is model in Sketchup parts of your model and export those parts to .mxs You can assemble those parts later on in SU. You can put textures on your model parts either in Sketchup or Maxwell Studio. But we never use many materials in one Sketchup masterfile since this slows down Sketchup a lot. After we done the parts and have set up the .mxs proxy we delete the materials in Sketchup since they are no longer needed for these parts. That is one of the great advantages. Very small SU files. I have done office interiors with flowers, tables, seats etc that could never have been done in a single SU file unless these files would have grown into +Gigabytes monsters. Have a look here, http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=52418 Proxies is how we work these days and how everybody will work in the future (with SU). Francois

Maybe Fredo Scale by Fredo 6 is your friend ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPbb8PPGtVg

I'm glad that helped. You'll find it is helpful for other reasons than just orbiting. Drawing with the the default axis orientation and solid blue up will make shadows correct and make your standard views more useful. If your model has a front, place it so it runs along the red axis direction and those standard views will all click into place.

@polzultov said: Hey guys, Patrick at Trimble sent me a phone number to call since I wasn't able to proceed to the payment page for 2013... and now the number is listed as non-working. Any ideas? 303-546-1100 didn't work on a few tries... Of course the more I read here about the new release the more suspect I become... Edit- Got an email back from P saying to call the number... let's see what happens tomorrow. That's good to hear

thank you. i'm sorry that was such an easy one. i googled to no avail. i'm guilty, after a few years of playing with sketchup, of not sitting myself down to a top to bottom investigation of all the menu items and their purposes. i've learned as i go and sometimes the easy stuff just eludes me.

That's the one. I owe you for that Massimo.

Just changed the heading to 'SketchUp Troubleshoot [Plugin set up advice]' to make it more searchable Mike

You can't apply multiple styles in a single scene in SketchUp but it wouldn't be difficult to combine different image exports using different styles in an image editor. In fact I do that quite frequently. There were three or four different styles used for this image if you count the shadows as a style. [image: 6743292439_e1e53c5165.jpg] Four different styles on this one, too. [image: 5601922220_e0c573092b.jpg]

@dave r said: Open SU8 from the icon. After it loads you can close it. Then you should be able to open files in SU8 instead of SU7. Yeah, I seem to remember something about it opening in whatever version you used last. Tried that but it didn't work, so I just uninstalled SU 7, problem solved

You can send me small example. I'll try to get some time to look at it.

Yes exactly, thanks for the link.

I managed to find my issue. When creating a surface from contours, I did not realise the resulting entity is a group. So I was actually applying the texture to the group, rather than the actual surface. When I went into the group and directly applied to the surface, it worked properly.

Hey Rich, thanks for the interactive pdf, can I open this with acrobat? never used one before

@unknownuser said: Where is the quote from? Yes from here I had FreeShip since many years: it has a very good Manual (in French very well detailed! This crazzy free prog permit to make anything** and has some poweful functions (unfold) but was very not fiendly UI and ergonomy compared to SU! ** in free is limited to hulls that are symmetrical with respect to the centerplane. So for car or plane that is sufficient! [image: t6mh_freship.jpg] [image: JWyf_freship1.jpg]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing it.

Thanks make that fixed it for me regarding dof circle & arc sides etc. I really thought i was going mad or that sketchup now was different. I was even hunting for a guilty plugin. Let's hope an update patch will soon fix this.

I apologise for going AWOL, i posted this in work (while looking for the solution) and then went and took an extended weekend. Anyway, you guys are incredible - Pilou, your method is perfect for a gentle column angle and Takesh h, your method of using the intersect curve from Round Corners.rb will prove perfect for more acute angles and Box, your advice about trying to take a component and re-use is well heeded. Your collective enthusiasm to help us mere mortals is inspiring. I admit I was hoping for a quick fix plug-in (since I have about 25 unique geometry columns to model) but both your steps are very clear and reproducible so shouldn’t take too much time… as long as the scheme doesn’t keep changing like it did today Oh, and Rich O Brien, the Blender demo makes me wish we used something more advanced than SK in my office. Cheers all!

Use the axis tool to localize ea line before making ea group (to fix - explode -make axes along the line - make group - repeate for ea line) Boxes should be gone.