I can honestly say that thomthoms solid inspector plugin turned SU from a program that I used to use sometimes into a program that I now use almost daily.

I've never seen anything quite like that before. Could you post the model or a potion of it to see if I can reproduce it? -Brodie

@tig said: Learn to 'select by fence', noting the different results from right>left and left>right corner drags. I read your post a few times and I get it now Thank you for helping me

thanks a lot i will try

Dave, the way you do detailed threads is pretty much how I do them. You probably use Dynamic Comps, but I only use SU-Free so mine are a far less flexible. However filesize is not my concern. Entity count is. I hate the way SU slows down when my total model lines count gets near a million. I use judicious layer visibility but even that sometimes does not help much. Small bolt holes are drawn 12 sided, large holes are standard 24 sides. In an airplane structure, sections of parts that are low stressed, like "I" beam webs, typically have large holes in them simply to reduce the weight of material. Hole size, placement and spacing is calculated not to impair strength or stiffness. In my models they are there more-so for a realistic look, as I do not calculate their existence. Like I said, I am not making shop drawings. I've attached an extract of my big airplanes cargo floor support structure to demo how I can reduce the entity count of (2) components that are used repeatedly in the model. Normally I do not show most bolts in my structural drawings, but here I had too, as I needed to present a higher level of realism for this model. For the majority of holes, large or small, I do not push through the hole to the opposite face. For a 24 sided hole that creates 96 entities per hole, 24 faces and 72 lines. I just draw 2 circles, and paint the "hole" with transparent white, for a total of 50 entities, 48 lines and 2 faces. 1/2 the detailed way. And it maintains solidity, although I have to calculate for the "extra volume" of the fake hole. I also paint both side of any face the same, so looking in a hole doesn't look weird. That also eliminates backside shine through at the edges. For holes that are threaded, I used to draw extra circles down the hole to look like threads, and that alone kicked the entity count way way up. So now, instead of transparent color, I use a dark gray. No extra entities. Same for bolts.How to reduce entity count, yet look the same.

Or to put it another way, the wheel zoom rate is proportional to the apparent distance from you (camera) to the object directly under the cursor (even if not selected). So the closer you are the "slower" the zoom. And that also accounts for the so-called "Hyper-Pan" or "Hyper-Zoom" when your cursor lands on empty space during repeated zooms or pans. The best recourse after a very slow zoom or when in deep space is to "View Extents" which will ballpark you to your object. "Previous View" is only good for the last 3 or 4 positions before cycling back. Another trick is to create a temporary scene before zooming in if you are going to be in close for multiple operations, and need to get back out to a common viewpoint multiple times.

As Dave says the load order of menus AND toolbars is determined by the name of the .rb file that is either is the whole script or loads another script from a subfolder [common for more complex tools]. Renaming the files means they load in a different order. If you do rename files make sure you keep a note so if you install an update you won't get duplicated tools loading. The 'alphanumeric' oder is 0-9A-Z with no noticeable differentiation between upper and lower case letters. Names starting with !#~ etc will load in that order, before '0'. Some files need to load early and already start with those characters, don't change those, and ensure they don't loose their early 'slots'... So a renamed #Zorro2.rb will load well before Aardvark.rb etc... This tweaking of the 'load order' still might NOT produce alphanumerically perfect lists! For example a [hypothetical] script named 'TIG-aardvark_and_zack.rb' would place the two tools that it creates [named 'Aardvark' and 'Zack'] in the menu/toolbar list where 'T' falls, because the .rb file's name starts with 'T' - you can't make the 'Aardvark' and 'Zack' tools 'separate' because they are both loaded, created and the menu/toolbar lists made at the same time as the one parent file is read by Sketchup; you can move the pair up and down the list by changing the initial letter of the parent .rb file - e.g. 'Aa_TIG-aardvark_and_zack.rb' or conversely 'Za_TIG-aardvark_and_zack.rb', BUT the two tools it makes will always appear next to each other in their listings !

It seems that whatever is in your bzier spline... folder, should be copied one level higher (straight under the plugins folder). You unzipped the archive keeping its "wrapping folder" instead of moving the content of that folder straight into the plugins folder.

@jgb said: This would be ideal to hide copyright notices within the model. See topic..... http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=42399&p=379799#p379799

@tig said: Simply, something is wrong with the SKP's database. Usually it's Lines with zero length, or Faces with zero area, but it can also be incorrectly 'named' objects like Layers etc... In the case you show there was a [useless] tiny face with a 'zero' area, which it erased. SUp has 'tolerances' so that two vertices within a range are deemed to be coincident, otherwise you'd never get anything to form! Thus very very short edges can be thought of as zero length, which then produces a zero area face... Sometimes things fall through the net... In this case if you were making a Followme extrusion of a profile that had some tiny edges and it went around a path with some tiny segments, then quite often it just fails to make those 'too tiny' faces (<~0.01sq") and leaves a hole in the mesh; in your case perhaps it actually made a tiny face that was effectively zero area, but after auditing the database and realizing it, SUp erased it - as it's effectively of no use to you. holy cow!!! seems like you've extracted all the coding of sketchup!!! you really know all the nuts and bolt assembling of sketchup working!

Never heard of that company before. cheers driven

@Jean Lemire: very instructive! I function as a tester for Tgi3D so I find all sorts of strange Sketchup bugs. A few months ago I came across a SketchUp feature which could be considered a bug. Imagine you are performing a move rotate or scale operation inside a component instance, Sketchup inference engine allows you to snap on a feature in another instance of the same component (which potentially depends on the edit you are performing). You can have Sketchup solve equations for you (or draw a dodecohedron directly for that matter). drawing_a_dodecohedron.skp

@unknownuser said: Do you mean something like this? ....OMG! OMG, that nails it!! @unknownuser said: Find ImageAnimator... HOLY MOLY!! Tig.. are you trying to give me a heart attack? OMG. What can I say. This is the most incredible plugin I've ever seen. Just downloaded it. ...now I've got no excuse to NOT work on that "project" I mentioned. This is unbelievable. My wife is gonna hate you. All I can say is ...you are a genius!! @unknownuser said: LightUp allows you to use animated textures Cool. I tried to use Lightup a while back. Another learning curve. But I'll try anything that will help with this project. Btw, I downloaded the free Maxwell Sketchup "renderer" too. Another learning curve...heck..I got so many "learning curves" on the list now...not to mention the Plugins..I spend half my day, half hour per learning curve..and I'm still so far behind the learning eightball ..egads..I think I'll never get a complete handle on ANY of them.(sighs) But as far as this Imageanimator thing is concerned..I'm excited. That's all I can say...other than THANK YOU GUYS!! Sketchucation to the rescue again!! Well...time to go to work. fitZ

d.instances[0].definition.name This line makes little sense. The definition uses an instance of itself to get its definition... It's equal to d.name. And d.name will avoid the error because Group doesn't have .definition.

Cool! I've thought about doing something similar possibly using material names to get the proper prices but I don't really need to do it so it would be more for the fun of it. Actually before I got SketchUp, I used to do some really cool things in Excel. I made a flight planning thing that had all the frequencies, elevations and other data for all the airports and navaids in Minnesota and the neighboring five states. From imported weather forecast info it would calculate great circle routes, estimated time enroute, estimated time to begin descent, fuel burn, estimated range margin and a ton of other things. It even generated the flight plan form for Flight Circus and created runway diagrams for the destination airports. Now, I draw in SketchUp and I've forgotten how to do a lot of that stuff in Excel.

... ah yes. I was using "a-20mm", not "a-20.mm", wondering why it didn't work... thanks

That's fantastic, thanks so much.

Many ways to skin a cat! Here's what I do: Draw the floor plan or import it if you use ACAD. Extrude the walls to the desired height. Set indidual level (floor plan and walls) as a group and assign its own layer. Repeat the same for other floors Draw the roof and repeat the same steps. That gives you a basic model I never draw in different scenes. I always draw in 3D and stick to one scene that is labeled "working model" You can name it whatever you like. I keep this scene simple for speed - no shadows or fog. Now you can go in and edit individual floors, adding windows and doors without affecting geometries of the other floors or roof. Just use layer control so you can easily isolate the group you are working on or you risk accidently erasing one of the other groups. The other thing you need to watch is that you are drawing in the correct layer, or verify after you are done.

That video should almost be compulsory for SketchUp users. This sort of thing comes up all the time.

I didn't think people would watch it completely (I hadn't watched it to the end). That's normal youtube, so either there is a problem in youtube or with Flash player. Back to the topic: I had also discovered that Sketch Up app. I'm sure that the SketchUp team has the name rights (at least in the US). Either Google doesn't care about this App in its own Android Market (!) because of the space in the name, or this indicates that Google still have no plans for a SketchUp mobile app. (At least they would care as soon as they have their own SketchUp app).