Great to see you posting here again Craig. We have missed you.

Beware of styles with large images set as watermarks.

@gaieus said: Did you doSudan??? Bummer you beat me to that post, same thing i was thinking. Anyway on my 600 aud budget computer. I got 350 000 of those pasted.

If you have SU7.1 Free install the DWG importer: http://sketchup.google.com/download/plugins.html#dwg (make sure you keep a copy of it.)

Type this into the ruby console: require_all("G:\Plugins") just make sure all of you're plugins are in "G:\Plugins" You're flash drive might not be named "G", in which case, you would need to type the letter of you're flash drive. require_all("F:\Plugins") Or, require_all("H:\Plugins")

Hi folks - thanks for the replies. I have been giving the plugins some trials without much success. For the record, it will only work for the smallest selection areas but will crash otherwise. I had better luck going with a typical 'from contours' surface even though it was less accurate.

@jarynzlesa said: to thomthom: can't find the V-Ray Toys plugin. Can you post a link. thank you. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=15491&p=119728#p119728

Hi Dave Thanks for the advice. It works although as you mention, adding more pages makes the animation longer to complete at that point. I'm basically trying to create walking up and down a street on a loop to illustrate how a building sits within a street scene. M @davidlouis said: Sketchup will string together scenes / saved views in a straight line. If an animation is producing an undesireable path (i.e. the camera goes under the model as you describe) you can insert additional scenes at key points to 'force' sketchup to transition between two views in a particular way... Rendering out the animation will take more time as sketchup will have to process more intermeadiate frames. You could counter this by changing the transition time between frames and thus the number of camera steps. A bit of trial and error will be needed. Hope this helps. Dave

Very useful. Not sure why I never tried this plugin because it looks excellent.

@box said: The mathematics is beyond my skill level, I still count by stamping my foot. +1 One of these days I'm going to have to dive into trig -- it seems alot of things I would like to be able to do rely on trig... Best, Jason.

Yo, mac1: Sure wish I had known about these links earlier. Seems a lot of discussion could be answered about this 64 bit question by simply providing the link. Thanks for sharing, because the info in both links is presented with clarity.

Yes, if the geography was in scale, it wouldn't look much different than a projected image. I picture a map or globe with the mountains and seas all exaggerated and obvious. Somebody somewhere must have something.

You are right. A transparent material (with a transparent image) does not receive shadow (just casts shadow). Sorry, I was wrong. And you are also correct that it does not receive shadow over 70% opacity. It only casts shadow when it is over. I do not know why I remembered incorrectly. In this case however, I can see no way you can cast shadow on a transparent surface - unless you draw the outline of the (supposed to be) shadow and make it darker this way "baking" it in the model. But of course, that will never be interactive (like when you change the sun position).

Hi, Charlie: I am glad that you were able to overcome the issue. I can see it was definitely out of my ability.

Hi folks. For the style question, I have this answer: 1 - Open the Style Window. Normally the Select tab shall be selected. 2 - Choose the "In model" Styles (the small house). 3 - Click on the Edit tab. 4 - Click on the third icon. 5 - Click on the square to the rigth of "Background". 6 - Check that you have RGB to the right of "Picker", if not, use the pull down list to select RGB. 7 - Slide all three cursors to 0 to get pure black. 8 - Click OK then Update the style. 9 - Hide the axes and you are done. For the stars, however, you would need to add some small dots or small geometries, using different colors since stars comes in all kind of colors or, better yet, use what was suggested, using a watermark made from a nice sky photos. There are now so many nice photos available on the web. Good luck with your project. This is one things I already though of modeling, the Rama spaceship, outiside and inside. Using the extremely precise description of A. C. Clarke, it should not be too difficult. Have you read all the four books of this saga ? See this : http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c3239ab7c577d245298d8588f7bc19ff By the way, since the ship is 54 km long, SU migth have clipping problem with such a large model if you draw it at a 1:1 scale. I would try using a 1:10 scale. But, try it as you whish since you can use the Scale Tool to adjust the size at any stage in the modeling process. You could even use a 1:1000 scale, using meters but pretending that they are kilometers. Just ideas.

Ah good, thanks for the solution (should anyone else need it)!

Not entirely sure I understand the post. So you just want to bring the linework into SU? Your info says you're using SU 7.1? If you're using any Pro version you can import the .dwg file directly. Otherwise, I believe up through 7.1 free version you can download the plugin from google. I can find a link if you need it. -brodie

@philippelemay said: Anyway, I got this: Acer Aspire AX3400-E3202 AMD X2 Dual-Core processor 2,8GHz 3GB DD3 RAM ... Nvidia GeForce 9200 integrated graphics unit ...asking for possible causes on why it's been so laggy. Because I can't accept the fact that it would be insufficient hardware on my part. a cheap soho system with a shared video solution is surely not the system dedicated to 3D cad modeling (aka number crunching) with OpenGL graphics output... why not asking before buying? If screen transformations (zooming, rotating, panning) is the lagging issue, you may want improve it by inputing a dedicated mid-range graphics accelerator as e.g. a nVidia GeForce GTS450 or an ATI Radeon HD5770 etc. hth, Norbert

How did you do that ely. Imported jpeg, traced over the lines. grouped it??, then sub divide in sks is that this http://www.smustard.com/script/SubdivideAndSmooth Looks good.

True, the count you get from face.mesh.count_polygons is SU's own internal triangulation. It might not match if you try to export and compare in another 3d application. But it works as a good complexity comparison between SketchUp models.