It's always better to ask people for permission (although the terms of service try to imply that everything publicly shared can be re-used, modified, derivated, redistributed. Every modeler has granted these rights for other users). Next to the username is sometimes a blue envelope icon that opens a contact form. Unfortunately users can turn it off and then there is no way to contact them (except you find their username somewhere else on the internet and are sure it's the same person). [image: U9sj_contact.png]

ok, if we are talking about create and animate organic characters and so on, i totally agree with you.. blender is blender.. but if we are just talking of a coffee cup i think sketchup is good enough, you are right, maybe you need a couple of plugins of course, but at least you don't need to import/export/convert/learn blender..

You can also try Edge Tools plugin: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=24593 Tool there that will highlight exactly where the gaps are.

And whilst I could not get different units displaying in the two panes, I did manage to get one pane to show the units suffix and the other pane display without the 'mm' - seems illogical and inconsistent. Before now it always seemed to display in current units properly ? Can anyone else get my effect ?

Yes.

This isn't it but http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=46287

Well that was easy. Thanks!

Thanks!!

Thank you John it's more clear, ( but was not easy to see if SU change only SU keys) I have not observed any troubling , just the informatons in the log of my FW I think that the post is close now

Yes, I agree with you and I will try the end points suggestion. Regards the surfaces I used curviloft but I am really struggeling with it as there is no real documentation. Things are happening that I don't understand, sometimes when I selct a line it will e.g. select a whole rectangle and so on. If you can point me to a tutorial that is suitbale for a humble beginner (skinning is what I'm really after) that would be great. Thanks for your kind help anyway. There are so many little things I am struggling but I set myself a bigger project knowing I will come across many points where I will have to learn new things. All the best Mike

Sometimes you just need a little help. Thanks for the quick reply and a proper fix!

Thank you TIG for your help. I was using the SCF Powerbar (I am not sure of the exact version, but it was listed as the most recent). I have downloaded the Component Spray v 1.4.3 and it works great. Thanks again.

I see you have a solution and you have the pro version. You could also have done this by creating a tube, dragging copies into place, size them and then use the solid tools to create the intersections or even use the old school method of intersect with model and clean up. Just saying as there seems to be a trend around here to look for plugin solutions before thinking about using the native SU tools.

That projector Valerostudio linked to is just a light, a mirror and a lens. The original artwork needs to be printed on paper so it'll project whatever you printed.

TIG that works excellently. Maybe it seems a small thing but it should make working in this project much better. Gives a perfectly aligned scene for LO. THANKS! Peter

Majid, the general advice is not to change the active layer (with the round "radio buttons") to anything but keep it Layer0. You can, of course change the visibility of layers (with the square "checkboxes") any time... Now when you add a new layer, it automatically becomes visible in each scene. This is how SU works by default. Jim has a plugin though which adds a layer that's hidden by default: http://sketchuptips.blogspot.hu/2007/08/add-hidden-layer.html

I found only these notes in the SketchUp manual about pre-processing photos: Do not crop photos. Match Photo currently requires that the point you aimed the camera at is located in the center of the image (also called the center of projection). Although it may seem possible to use a cropped image, typically vertical lines will not align well across a cropped image and the results will be unsatisfactory. Do not warp photos. Images which have been manually warped using an image processing program, or specialized camera, are not supported by Match Photo. Remove barrel distortion or issues where straight lines are bent away from the center of the image. Barrel distortion typically occurs on wide angle lens cameras. Use a third-party product to eliminate barrel distortion from images prior to using them within Match Photo. All cameras have a little bit of this distortion and it is typically worse around the edges of the image. Point 1 is the most repeated advice about Match Photo. Point 2, about warped photos, would seem to me to exclude using ShiftN. I can imagine using ShiftN to apply photo textures, but I presume its distortion of the photos will make them unsuitable for Match Photo. Point 3 is what I assume Thomthom was referring to by "lens distortion". This lens appears to be excellent in that respect. It is extremely hard to find any evidence of barrel distortion. But, as I reported earlier, I appear to have non-square pixels, the images as displayed are all a bit narrower than the model. If anyone has any experience with how to accurately test that aspect of a camera lens, I would appreciate any suggestions. I will probably be working out my own tests this coming weekend. I presume I will need a way to accurately identify the position of the center of the lens while the camera is on a tripod pointed at a flat surface that is exactly perpendicular to the camera's line of sight. Theory is easy. Construction still awaits a design. A brute-force approach would be to simply try different values for the adjustment until I find one that seems pretty good. But since it can take up to an hour of fussing and fiddling to reach what I consider my best compromise, that approach is guaranteed to take a few hours. Again, brilliant ideas are always welcome. Thanks, August

That's the thing though. The color is correct when 2D exported or when using Print Screen. It's just an orange cast when viewing the model in realtime. It's really not too much of a problem it just a bit annoying. I was satisfied with the secondary color of my ship until I saw the color shift. I went ahead and approximated the actual color I wanted in Photoshop the replaced the value in SketchUp with that so now at least when exported it now looks right.

Well, it seems to be working now, new colors are going directly to the right folder, and are showing up in SU. Not sure how this came about though. After much fuss and googling, managed to change security permissions back to where they were, which should have meant that the new colors were going to the App folder as they were originally, but like I said, they are going to the folder in the SU program and show up in SU. I really hate it when a problem gets solved but I don't know what solved it. Oh well. Thanks again.

Thanks guys, really appriceate the feedback your a big help. I plan on using SU a lot this year and really want to get the most out of the program. @ TIG... your a legend... I dont know where I'd be without section cut face... Well done dude!