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.

How's it going Mike? I haven't heard anything yet.

Ok will try get in touch with them. Thanks!

Open the group for editing first. Remember, you can put mustard on the sandwich until you open the wrapper.

Dave, Thanks so much for your clarifications and your PM explaining things. You answered a number of questions about process and workflow. Putting all the geometry on the default layer (thank you TIG) solved my immediate problem. I'll work on the other issues in the next model. Best, Jim

I know this probably wouldn't work in most situations, but it did in this simple one. Your method of enlarging the area around the image will probably be what I use in the future.

Wiped the Registry for SU8 and restarted, and now the menu's back, but not sure why it went away in the first place.

Here's the other side of the building. [image: portlandlighting2.jpg]