Frascati, I can't do much in the way of helping with your modeling issue, but offer this humble advice. Do not delete this thread or any of your posts. They will serve you well in the future. They will be reminders of what the true source of your frustrations were and the solution(s) to them. Years ago in the midst of preparing final presentation boards for an architectural class, I realized that I had made a basic layout error causing the previous 40 hours or so of work to be completely useless. I sat at the drafting table looking for something or someone to blame, and could find none. I ripped the board off the table and stomped on it with a mighty fury. An exact replica of my gym shoe was left smack dab in the middle of it. I grabbed a beer out of my dorm fridge and made my way to the top of the "world famous" architectural building on the campus. While sitting atop one of the two massive girders supporting the building, sipping a cold one and looking at the Chicago skyline, I reflected on why I wanted to become an architect along with pondering what foibles and obstacles the architect who designed the building beneath my rear had overcome. I realized that perseverance rather than perfection was going to be my way thru. I literally went back to the drawing board and worked there continuously for about 3 days and nights and finished the work. It turned out quite well. I keep that screwed up "Strathmore" board with shoe print in a flat file in the house, it is a reminder of how close I came to letting my anger destroy what has been a really good life in architecture, and a good life in general.

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=193238#p193238 adds a Z value above a datum. That changes as the text is moved in the Z...

@pbacot said: Maybe a camera tool can create a plane that is correct to project onto. There is actually a plugin for that, but I forget the name right now..

I agree the leaders are weak. If they are going to be offered, they could at least use the profile style. I like my leaders delicate but this SU one has never been acceptable to me graphically. It's just for inside SU work (notes for the modeler or forum posts) for my money. I just stopped looking to SU for those sort of things. The text tool DOES do a lot of things my 2d CAD tool can't, like hang on to an object when moved and in all sorts of views, give component names or area or take on plugin info. As for the SCF One-Click Plugins, I think that will be getting huge fanfare and hard to miss.

That video in itself is a great way to see how Artisan can be used. Thanks for sharing, I learned a bit!

@sfto1 said: I searched thru the site for any info on accurately placing section planes, as opposed to eyeballing them, and I cannot find anything. Does anyone know if this is possible? Another method, general approach, to see where you are going with the section plane.... as a group: You can draw on a section plane, so: create a section plane and make it inactive (double click on it) draw two intersecting finit construction lines on the section plane (or one edge) select both construction lines (or the edge) and the section plane > make group. this group has a convenient grip, the intersection (or two endpoints) and can be placed, rotated etc. to fit in the geometry at the correct location/orientation. Best to do so in X-Ray. Right click the group > Explode > double click the section plane to make it active.

Try making textures, that should result in rectangular textures on each surface vs. skewed textures that other programs may not play well with.

Your design is really good, design-wise (and subject to personal taste). And one thing is for sure, we all are looking forward to see refresh and modernization of some sorts. Interesting is how you realized the paradigms of the desktop (WIMP) with the design language of the Metro interface (that Microsoft originally targeted for different paradigms). Though there are some challenges, namely SketchUp is a multi-platform software and tries to use user interaction concepts that are shared by all supported (and future supported) operating systems. Symbolic or monochrome icons work well for a small repertoire of items but how do they work with huge amounts of icons (see John's studies)? Actually John's screenshot collection is a good point to start, what if we share mockups how we imagine SketchUp to become modern (again) and to develop in future? Maybe we have to raise the bar by creating attractive and convincing "images" to underline our list(s) of feature requests?

@aarondietzen said: Hi all, So over in another area of the forum it has been revealed that there was a bug in SketchUp related to materials and observers. It looks like they will be fixing it in the near future. We have been looking into this an working directly with SketchUp in an effort to get this fixed the right way (as opposed to us creating a monster of a solution to get around the problem). It is great to see that they are on it! Thanks! Aaron Now we will see if Trimble's idea of "On It" is the same as Google's.

Jean, Your tutorials are beautifully compact. and Dave R, Your helpfulness is greatly appreciated also.

funso, I've moved your last post in a new thread.

Thanks for that tip guys. Big help! : )

Thanks TIG, I've found nothing way over the horizon as it were (or way above or below), and the jaggy problem only occurs with parallel projection (and only really shows with 3D/iso type views), with perspective views it's all fine. Its probably time for a reinstall.

This is not needed any more as SU has already made large address aware which means it can use up to 4Gb of memory on a 64 bit system - but for many people, this is still not enough so for this particular issue (rendering large scenes with many, high resolution materials etc. inside SketchUp) a true 64 bit version seems to be the solution.

I'm curious now, you have added the stair idea, but the shape you are talking about folds back on itself, therefore making it impossible to form a walkable staircase, unless your name is Escher. Are you trying to make something like this? [image: Stair.JPG]

Thomthom has a plugin that will draw a box with the same size orientation as the bounding box.

Cheers TIG, can't believe i missed that, all this time. That little bit of info is worth its weight in gold, should save lots of time now. Thanks for the codes too, they should provide some good avenues for me to explore ruby coding.

Could you post a component or two? Or, if you don't want to share publicly, do you want to PM them to me? I'll see what I can see.

@rodman100 said: Try these... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCEoIcBfcw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AIzFNB9C2A or this series showing importing CAD dwgs, aligning plans & elevations to respective levels by robyn shrestha... https://vimeo.com/20773126 These links are great references. Thanks! For those after me, the first has audio, and the Robyn Shrestha series is detailed but no audio.

You can use Selection Toys to select faces of the same orientation. I use that often for such task you describe.