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).

Another vote here for "carbonite". Very cheap for the amount of storage you can get and its been a life saver for me on a couple of occasions. Also a handy feature is that you can remotely access all your backed up files no matter where you are in the world. Handy when you realise you left that all important client presentation back at home when your a thousand miles away!! Data recovery specialists seem to be a licence to print money. I've never known anyone that has been able to recover data from a wiped/trashed hard drive. All you ever get is a large bill!

@jean lemire said: The apparent jerkyness of a movement is irrelevant as long as the object being moved end up at the intended position. However, this jerkiness can be minimized if SU has less geometry to show. In other words, try to minimize the workload on the GPU (Graphic Processor) by using less demanding rendering mode like shadedinstead of shaded with textures, no shadows, no fancy edge styles, etc. You can memorize rendering setups with scenes. For example, using Styles, create a minimalist rendering mode for work that you will use when modeling including moving and then create another mode that have all the bells and wistles. Create two scenes, each one using one of these styles. Disable, however, the camera position memorisation for these scenes to avoid loosing a crefully orbitted, panned and zoomed view. Once that is done, you simply click on the minimalist scene tab to work. Your model will the respond fluidly. when ready to see it in its full glory, click on the other scene tab. Note that with a relatively simple model, you shall not experience such jerkyness unless your graphic card is not very strong or you have disabled fast feedback or hardware acceleration or both in the Open GL preferences. Thank you sire for the reply . i'm using the thinline mode with no colour..[purple and white faces mode] i have disabled only hardware acceleration because when i make a selection window, the monitor goes black with lots of coloured rectangle pieces scattered over it. i still have to find a graphic card driver update. i have a gigabyte brand motherboard, they still haven't released new updates

The biggest problem, I think, are the save/load times associated with SU and large files. They become unbearable for me long before I have any major crashing issues. 3ds Max has comparably incredibly fast save times, I suspect Rhino is similar. -Brodie

hi, 'SketchUp Web Exporter' available from the SU download site. or there are tweaked versions/alternatives kicking around, do a forum search. john