thanks, I have that tool! it got buried in one of my replacement plugin menus

mirjman, These are the nicest images i have seen in a while. i'd love to hear about your process to create these, a tut?

@Gaieus Thanks! Very powerfull tool. First, i have some trouble but when i find context menu, everything it's ok! Thanks again!

Just put profile lines on with a thickness of 1. Styles/edges

That's tough. Perhaps if you clarified exactly what you need and what you need it for. There are thousands of cities in the world and all are a bit different and the type you need is probably relative to where your clients are located. You can try to search Google images for things like "Urban Communities", "Urban Centers", "Town Square", etc. I still say your best bet is to get out with a camera and spend a day in an area relevant to your archvis projects and take as many photos as you can. If you want 3D backgrounds that are ready made with all that stuff in it, I know of nothing like that on the market, except for hobbyist software like DAZ3D and iClone. Most archvis professionals want more control over their projects and would rather create the entourage and backgrounds themselves so it doesn't look like they just drop clip art into their scene.

Jean yes, you are right, infact SU obvioulsy cretaes poly meshes when it exports to *dwg... maybe there is a mesh to 'solid' (acis) converter somewhere... ? if i find it, i'll post back here Merci en tous les cas Paddy

Thanks for the input - Have solved the issue by eg: Walls - edit>select all & placing them back on their original Layer via Entity Info which has worked! Layer0 had remained On all the time as I always group & create separate Layers via Entity Info as I work, so not sure what happened but the wheels are back on!!!!

That always happens when (after selecting the scale tool) you zoom in too quickly. They are still visible - go on scaling this way for now...

Juan, 3D trees - especially at this density and amount - are just too many polygons and too much load for GE. What the 3D Tree Layer in GE does is that they have a certain level of detail (LOD) engine in them which will turn them less detailed when seeing from a distance and even 2D when seeing from a bigger distance. Even the close-up is a highly optimized way of displaying vegetation (not the way SU builds up these trees for sure). Many game engines work the same way. There is an interest at Google to eventually make this tree layer public and allow contributors to populate their own area with them but until then it is a futile effort to do this as it kills GE as you can also experience.

Hey TIG - think I owe you a beer or two! Thanks for you help with this, very much appreciated! Will give this a try and will also have a look at SKMtools too. Cheers Sam

Another great suggestion. I will try that tonight and report back!

@rc5 said: @bob james said: @unknownuser said: sketchup gives a bug splat when i close the window. This happens to me often I also am continually plagued with the right-click menu being greyed out. So I have to weed out the conflicting plugin(s). I've seen this grayed out thing very often, but not the component browser. May I have the list of plugins that are the culprit? It's not a 'culprit' plugin or two. It's a result of the number of plugins you have loading - the context-menu etc can only support a certain number of 'commands' - if you exceed it by having hundreds of plugins vying for space it will 'gray-out'. This is a discussion about it AND even a plugin that tries to optimize 'command' usage http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=252413#p252413 . However its success will be limited if you have too many plugins loading - you can 'spring-clean' and disable the ones you never use that are contributing to the 'critical-mass' that's tipping you over the 'gray-out' limit - rename the little used .rb files with .TXT suffix, and then if you find later you want it to revert you can just remove the suffix and restart, OR to load it for that session only use ' load "xxxx.rb.TXT"' in the Ruby Console - where 'xxxx' is the tool/script's name. Note that if you have the latest version of your plugins then this will also help - a few scripts [including several of Fredo's] were found to contribute to this 'gray-out' issue by making 'duplicated' commands - as far as I know they have all be updated many months ago to avoid this contributory factor... Look through your Plugins and the Plugins Index to ensure you are up to date too...

how large model u have been build on the sketchup?

post some vidoes review for the sketchup model please...! tq!

Enjoy

Yes I use it, it's nice. See my post : http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=39864

mitcorb thanks for the feedback. I use an external usb drive to work from. I find i can keep my computer lean and mean by removing all the file clutter out of it. The issue went away when i restarted Su after the files started appearing. What's annoying about it is that every time you save it saves another copy of the file and numbers it 1,2,3 so forth. the original file does not get saved, if that makes any sense. Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

@dave r said: How about this? Color the wall with the color of the paint and name the material "drywall" Paint the box blue and rename the blue material "20 ga. sheet metal" Paint the piece of furniture with a woodgrain material the color of the stained cherry and name it "cherry" A simple note can identify the finish. +1 I always try to name my material so I can find and reuse them. A model becomes messy if you keep picking the same colour from the material browser - ending up with many materials of the exact same colour. That just lead to a pain when you want to change it later on. Give material a semantic meaning and make sure you use the correct one for the correct place. Managing materials becomes so much easier that way.

@rock1 said: @pbacot said: Sorry it's not working. And you ARE in perspective camera view? Yes I am in perspective. Sketchup is really troubling me sometimes in the components browser, on clicking the down arrow drop down menu in it when I click components, it gets stuck. i.e. for e.g. if I have the landscape library opened and i want to go back to the architecture pack it won't show up. When I restart sketchup, it starts working fine. Looks like my system has a sketchup virus or somethin' you have another post for this question... try to keep your posts together and not spread out. this is a known issue called clipping. your model has extremely small geometry and extremely big geometry... and the origin is to far from the farthest point.

thanks guys, I knew it would be simple !