Ecuadoran— Wile the answer to this and many other questions remain shrouded in the realms of mystery, you can select an object, Scale, start to move a control point, and then type in the percentage or size you want to end up with. If you are shooting 0.1% (or less, say 0.01), just grab a control point and move it a bit, then type in a number. Less than one shrinks, more than one expands, negatives make mirror images. If you add a unit of length afterwards, it scales that dimension to the number you typed, as in 1mm; 3.5"; .7m; 42'. Best, JIm

hellnbak— WIthout seeing the geometry I can't say, but I just had success with a similar issue when someone posted the technique for making edges invisible without erasing them: —Find the inner edge that's bleeding through —Open the group or component that contains it —Select the Eraser tool —While holding down the shift key, click on the line that bleeds through You still see any color or texture, but without the hard line that ends it, and the inner color does not bleed through. Best, Jim

You're exactly right. Up until now we had to login with our personal Google accounts at work to be able to use the 3D warehouse. Now you can use your Google Apps account. Pretty sweet!

@tig said: using components for repeated geometry/objects, and the small overhead of importing it into another model is inevitable because of the additional data needed to describe it within its new home Yeah, as I just told Gaieus, I've accepted that this is going to happen. I don't like it, but I accept it. @tig said: You can achieve the level of detail in other ways - e.g. apply a 'tread texture' instead of modeling every indentation into its faces in 'reality'. Actually the treads are a texture (until I can get around to putting in the real things ) @tig said: you need to remember that the instances and the number of displayed facets and edges etc that you have in your one tyre/wheel is more that a whole complex building might include. This WILL have affects on the performance of SUp panning/zooming, exporting and rendering etc Actually it has not affected panning, orbiting, zooming, anything (so far). And I am coming close to reaching the dreaded 10mb limit. Occasionally my textures will start to blank out when doing something, but all I need to do is purge (even if there's nothing to purge) and things are back to normal. Any idea why this is? Probably won't have the nerve to upload the dang thing when I do finish it. But this has been my learning model, so it was worth it. @tig said: be aware that detailing every last bit of an object is often unnecessary - especially when you won't ever be seeing it, or might never expect to see it so close up so you'll never notice the simplified form. I have kept this is mind, and I don't include detail that likely won't be noticed or benefit the model. As I mentioned before, tires and wheels are very important to the appearance of a car, so I did splurge on them. Overall I think the benefits of this have justified the extra edge count. Wow! Screws under the chairs, with full threads! Can I have her phone number?

Here's a picture of my first attempt. I'm referring to the carved worm between the top and bottom turnings. The extra lines above and below them I left in for editing purposes. Thanks in advance, Jim [image: L07U_Knop.jpg]

You are not alone. When I went from 7 to 7.1, my home system failed to utilize the OpenGl spec. Because my home graphics adapter was an older model, the manufacturer did not provide a driver upgrade. However, my work system continued to function with our problems into v8. What graphic adapter are you using? If you are unwilling to turn OpenGl off, you should consider a upgrade to a newer card. It doesn't have to be the best, only compatible with SU. Or you can continue to use the older Sketchup version that works with OpenGl.

@gaieus said: If you project the texture and only project it on the face(t)s you need to project, it should not tile. Have a look at this topic. It is not about a car and logo but a bottle and label but the idea is the same. Download the models attached and have a look at how they are composed. I have tried that too. I jus dnt understand why it tiles. I only need one logo lol Thats it.

Hmm- interesting. I'll contact Martin who makes Cheetah3D, ask him how to get around the problem. I'll also drop the Unity crowd a note too (the perfect excuse now to join their forum!). Thanks Tom

Thanks, Tom- very helpful. I'll pass the offending object on to our testing folks to see if they can reproduce your problem in the lab. john .

It's no more than a standard stair with the landing expanded as one of the treads. My guess is your are not " dropping " the stringer to equalize the risers from top to bottom, they are usually not allowed to vary by x which I think is about 1/16. Just design a standard stair and find out where you are making the error. Try to use a story pole to make the layout of the risers easy on your self without all the math, that is use SU line divide function to establish a ref. FYI Rule of thumb for the run is ( 2x rise) + ( 1x run) = 25 ± 1 When all else fails post your model if you can

jonathanB this file is an update showing a portion of an hand rail concept http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=9df4585fbb0ebe4f427d16763a0ff49. I don't know what you want so it is a watse of my time to design very much. Some suggestion for you: Use the follow me and keep plugin to avoid rotation of the profile if you use soemthing other than circler; Establish the profile ref at all segment break points so gaps do not form including at the tread and its riser so the profile follows the stair segments; I think this approach keeps most of the effort you have into the model without having to start over. Good Luck Let us know how you are progressing

Are these 3d geometry formats? Or do they pertain more to the fluid and how it moves? You're making it easy to give a good answer as to whether someone can help you

They keep hearing about it...

possibly the most noticeable difference between the two will be the paint bucket tool. mac su uses the OS X color picker and if your friends are familiar with their computers then they'll be familiar with the color picker.. unfortunately, SU modifies the color picker so that a list view of the materials aren't given in mac SU and you have to rely on thumbnail views of materials or popups for the actual names. there are also differences in which modifier keys to use with different tools.. namely the cmmd and option keys on macs being different than ctrl and alt on pcs. see these reference cards for details. http://dl.google.com/sketchup/gsu8/docs/en/SketchUp8RefcardMac.pdf http://dl.google.com/sketchup/gsu8/docs/en/SketchUp8RefcardWin.pdf there are actually a few things you can do in mac SU that you can't in windows but since you're training from pc to mac, i don't think it matters much at this point. re: setting up the workspace.. the toolbars work differently on macs and pcs.. all of the toolbars on mac will be floating unless the tools are added to the custom toolbar at the top of the su window.. that said, as far as teaching sketchup goes, it shouldn't matter much and your friends can just arrange their toolbars as they deem comfortable. all in all though, sketchup is very similar on both platforms.

Good thing in Fredo's plugin that it keeps the sizes of all the facets and the rest of the model as a whole (so the image will fit exactly as it does on the flat one). Bad thing is that it screws up UV mapping even when I position the texture before subdividing (i.e. all the texture pieces should still be positioned - or not? I will have to check). Edit; even if I "pre-position" the texture on each facet first, the plugin screws everything up. I wonder if Fredo could do something with it.

Doesn't Blender's UI look the same on all platforms?

@tridem said: I'm pretty new to wings, but I believe it's very improved since then, with features like sculpting, tweak mode, boolean operations and so on... So I gathered from reading the PDF manual. Looks pretty good! Still not perfect, but I don't expect perfect when using Freeware, which I am still going to be doing until my budget has room for other than rent. If there were any justice in this world, software and food would be considered necessities, right along with beer and wine. I think I will be checking out w3d this weekend. I'm swamped with school stuff this week. >sigh< Anyway, once again, thanks!

Hi Robert, You need at least two, co-planar faces with different textures on them. If you have 10 faces, you can have 9 textures the same but the 10th has to be different. If they are all the same, right click on one and make it unique first then combine with the rest.

Good point Csaba. I wasn't thinking about components that are designed to glue to surfaces. If there's no surface, they'll lay on the ground plane.

I have had to base color's black value (shade) on a percentage - 0 to 100 for representational purposes. So 0 black meant 0% of what I was showing, 100% black meant 100% of what I was showing. Also, I also tend to think of the amount black as a percentage. For these 2 reasons, I like to see the black value represented as 100, instead of 255.