I'd be willing to draw them for a fee. PM me if you want to discuss it.

Thank you Rich, I've downloaded both and will be trying them out when I have a few minutes.

I poked about last week and I was investigating some edge loop routines.

I'll comment again probably where I have no business , but I expressed concern some time ago related to issues with plugins probably costing Google support dollars and if the the issues raised are not brought under control you may will find your self where Google will impose requirements you may not like. Dan Rathburn tried but don't think he had much success. Secondly: When one talks about problems and SU blame that's very generic and you have to worry memory snd system also. For a 32 bit machine , that means you can only address 4GB but SU only gets 2GB9 If you have 4GB RAM) because the way the MS memory manager works. Even if you have a 64 bit machine and tons of memory SU will still only be allocated 4 GB even though 64B allows much more address than that. Some of these strange artifacts can very well be memory issues. When you have problems watch the task manager and see and understand what it is reporting. Win xp, vista etc are not all the same. See this link if you have some spare time and want to under stand virtual memory, which is what programs get to use, and physical memory. It will make your eyes glaze over?? http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx. and the post here in of opening a 360MB SU file with Win XP pro and 4GB Ram http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=39401 Thirdly:It is completely unreasonable to tag Google with any responsibility of running regression testing of any external plugin in the software drop. If you have had to do this you will know what I mean. Sorry if I am totally out of line

No, both versions will co-exist in parallel. It's relatively painless... The only complications are that v8 grabs SKP files opened by double-clicking - but you can drop-open files, or use 'open with...' right-click context-menu, or open them from within an active v7 SUp session etc; by default it will also save from v8 as a v8 SKP, meaning that a former v7 SKP can no longer open in v7 - BUT you can do a 'save_as' in v8 and specify an earlier version - so v8 can save as v7 [or even earlier] but you need to do it deliberately each time. Also remember that you will need to transfer/copy any custom components/materials/styles/plugins/importers/exporters/etc across from v7 to the equivalent folders in v8 [do not mess with anything in the 'tools' folders - the v8 ones will not always be identical to v7's]; your current shortcuts in v7 should be auto-replicated into v8 [but check after the install] and check that the v8 preferences for folders etc look to the correct v8 folders - some might still [wrongly] look for the v7 equivalents and the image-editor etc are set as in v7...

i just tried a workaround with the trial version of the new keyframe animation plugin. though its intended for object animations it has a tween feature that automatically creates all the transition frames between scenes in a separate file with a specified framrate. after creating the new file with all the tweened frames i exported the file again as an animation with transition and delay set to zero, which the plugin also does automatically. sensational result: the animation export to png with imagesize set to full screen resolution took only 15min at 25fps. the creation of the tweens went nearly instant. this is great, i think i will invest into this nice plugin. only downside, the tweening process ignored hidden objects in some scenes. i will have to see if i can find out why...

Hello Evan, thanks for replying to my thread I'll look into your software

@mitcorb said: This looks like very common importation problems having to do with long distance from SU origin... I am almost pretty sure that's the case here, too. Make sure that when importing CAD files, you do not preserve their drawing origin (this is step 1 of the trouble shooting process as there may be any stray geometry elsewhere as well as groups/components may have their origins in outer space somewhere but start here) [image: ZNQB_PreserveOrigin.jpg]

@tig said: Paypal doesn't accept beer! However, I do Could you point me to it, please? @tig said: If you ever plan to be in the NE let me know... Love Northumberland, went to Newcastle uni and lived up there for 6 years, on and off, in total. Even proposed on Holy Island. Lot's of happy memories.

@benha said: ....So I was scaling this by using the tape measure tool..... When you do this, you get weird results.... Same here, I went for the "easy" approach, the 'Tape Measure' tool and not the scale tool where you need to input 0.00333....(repeat3). So I couldn't help you out. But both methods don't seem to give the exact same results! The 'Tape Measure' method fails, while the 'Scale' tool still works (except for e few softened edges) Thanks for bringing this up.

@dave r said: Oh. The only things you can change are those you can make in the display settings under the Control Panel. You won't be able to change the button appearance though. I was afraid you'd say that! I wonder if we can add a manifest file to the .exe?

+1 on that

Hi There Following all the help I had on this (thanks again!) I've successfully modelled and completed the project. Ive posted the renderings in the gallery if anyones interested there's a link below thanks again http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=39465

@mbeauvais said: I am trying to render a scene from SketchUp and continue to get error 183 no matter how small I set the exported image to be. I have 157GB free on my hard drive. Windows 7. The file is large 205MB, and there are many components and materials in it, but it has been purged many times to try and minimize it's impact. The rendering software is Indigo, and the skIndigo plug-in. But I can't even get Indigo started because SketchUp gives me the 183 error on export. We are running SketchUp 8 pro. I have seen many forums on animations, but not on single image renders. If you can point me to a thread that covers this type of problem or if you have any suggestions, please help. Thanks, M I'm not exactly sure what error 183 means but for a scene this large, I recommend trying out the new SkIndigo 3.0 beta which is greatly improved for exporting huge scenes: http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=11055 SkIndigo does not yet support Image export. You should explode any image components if you want them to show up in the render.

thanks!

Have you tried using the Autodesk FBX converter TIG suggested?

I suspect it's because the 3ds version doesn't save out the soft property of the edges. Certainly useful to know what formats preserve quads when transferring into SketchUp. Think I'll add a routine into Quad Tools to convert triangulated quads separated by a hidden edge into soft edges. Seems it would be a operation often required if people want to take quad meshes from other applications into SketchUp.

First release is out there: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=39442

@driven said: I tried boolean helper [ruby] to upscale 1000x then jpp to 250 inches seems to work... you do have some stray geometry that might be throwing it off... or try thomthom's shell john Stray geometry??? Where? EDIT---------------------- I closed the 8 slots on the base unit and put a temp cover on it to form a solid. Using SI I found some extra lines and corrected them. Then scaled up 10X. This time SU crashed at about 75% along the JPP progress scale.

@mitcorb said: Hi, rock1: Look in Plugins Index, red button at top of this page, navigate to author "-BTM", look for link to Sculpt tool. This might help. awessssssome!! didn't know such an awesome freeform deformation tool existed