A nice trick I like to use is the following, but mathematically not exactly the same as the above options. It's very fast though, and versatile. Activate pencil tool Hold mouse over rectangle (or any other desired face) until it says 'on face' from then on, hold shift. draw any desired shape, aligning with points or lines already in the drawing (NB: aligning with a line is not the same thing as aligning with a point!) after finishing the shape, release shift.

looks like he is a hitch hiker... got his free ride and disappeared.

@gaieus said: Even easier (than to applying on both sides) to import such an image as "Image" (not texture), scale it to your needs then right click > Explode (or leave it as an image entity). My Duh! moment...thanks Gaieus!

Thanks Tig, that helps a lot. now i got it. ...What can i say... thx guys Cookieschredder

What I ended up doing was adding a new face to a group, by retracing the lines of the group. I ended up pulling the new face out a tiny bit to keep the new layer from "flaring" or reacting with the original face, when orbiting/moving it works for now.

lso worth mentioning that "Hidden line" face style will not be shaded (when sun is turned off). This is good to know when you need to export some 2d thing for post-precessing (like creating alpha masks and such). Also it does not use the default material but the beckground colour.

Of course no problem with the wrong place - I just didn1t understand. And welcome to SCF by the way. I saw that you were directed here in the SU Help Forums, too - now found TIG so you should be able to sort this out with him.

It worked, thanks for all the help it is much appreciated!

Thomthom has a plugin called UV Toolkit that can do wonders. Have a look at this arch texturing tutorial where I used it. Also, even if it is not about an arch (and of course your arc is semicircular), you can position the texture on just one segment and use the Copy-Rotate tool to distribute it along the arc (in this case it will of course be the same texture on each facet)

So... I think I have it now. here is a picture of it and how it relates (in principle) to what I am doing in case you are curious... The octagonal thing holds the 12" diameter telescope mirror. [image: 9DRX_rockerbase.jpg] First, I drew the outline and used the offset tool to draw 1/2" in (on a separate copy) I drew the first large hole bottom dead center. then I measured 3 degrees to the left and estimated the center, trial and error. Then I did the same thing on the right for the remaining holes. The crescent attaches to the mirror box with four 5/16" bolts. The box, the crescent and the tine on the far side rotate in altitude about the hole in the tine. The crescent rests on two teflon bearings. The whole thing rotates about the azimuth in the center of the base plate. I gotta say, that after making the crescent, (took perhaps 3 hours) the rest of it went together in about 45 minutes from scratch. Did I ever mention how much I love Sketchup?

@danbig said: Has anyone come up with a good way to save a few different workspaces for sketchup? I'm on Windows XP with SU Pro 7.1 Well.. on Windows, Sketchup saves all the data in the User hive of the Registry, so... the only (easy) way now, to run SU differently OR run diferent minor releases of the same major Sketchup version, is to create separate User accounts on Windows. In your case.. the NORMAL user for mutli-screen, and a SECONDARY account for single-screen. There are filesharing issues however. You'd need to save your models in the 'All Users' folder tree (displays as 'Shared Documents') so you could access them from both accounts. (..or just "Share" the secondary user's Documents folder and subfolders.) After making the secondary account, you log off it, and onto the normal account. Then when you need to run Sketchup in single-screen mode, you do a "Run As..." (right-click your Sketchup icon, and choose 'Run As..',) and run Sketchup as the secondary user, but still you can run anything else as the primary user (most importantly your email client,) etc. because your still logged on as the primary user. You'd never really ever need to log onto the secondary user, if the primary user is an administrator; because admin's can see all user hives in regedt32.exe in case you need to look at the secondary's SU settings in the Registry. So your just using the secondary user account, to create a separate User Hive to save Sketchup settings for a Single-Screen mode. (You could even name the user SingleScreen.)

People really seem to have problems printing directly from SU. Here is a quick fix solution: Export all your scenes as images, then print them individually. I hope this solves your problems until you get a real answer!

Well I do have a lot of plugins, I think just downloading random ones is becoming a habit. But I say as long as the ones you need are at close at hand its ok. I recommended an idea a while back when I suggested Sketchup in full screen, for those of you who don't remember here it is: Basically when you put SU in full screen all you see is the modeling window. But if you move your mouse to the side your tools slide out. So it was possible to have a normal window full of tools (most of them are obviously from plugins) and still have plenty of work space. Now the idea was ahem AWESOME in my opinion but it aroused not many people to their delight. But back to the topic - the only monster it becomes is the monster that a computer might not be able to handle. Even though I'm trying my hardest to reduce all the junk that came from my habit, I still can't get it to the point like it was. But don't worry I'm getting close. So if you don't mind having over 100 files in your plugins folder, then go ruby crazy. It took my modeling to the next level to say the least.

Hey guys thanks so much. Chris: I was afraid you would say that. I would have preferred a script that does everything at render time and not messing with geometry. I'm just afraid that one time its going to mess something up or texture mapping might get messed up. Definitely worth a shot though. TIG: Thanks for making this. I will have to try it out! Getting the vertical to scale properly will be necessary so thanks for the tip.

@chris fullmer said: We'll have to wait and see what 8.0 brings. Hopefully more greatness. I'm personally hoping for even more Ruby improvements for the ruby developers and more UI improvements. And greater ability to deal with large models would be cool too. Ditto! Developing SketchUp as a platform is something the users will benefit much greater of in the long run. That and sort out current bugs and UI annoyances. (Yes, I'm looking at you Toolbar Chaos and Shadow Bug)

Hey all Really sorry for not getting back to you sooner, I've been offline for a little while. You guys really helped, we turned a few things off as Thom suggested and turning off unused materials helped alot too! I'm sorry I didn't send over the file, it's a client file and it was best I checked with them first (I still haven't heard back from them) If I can, I will send the unedited model over and let you guys go to work on it Thank you!

You can set the grid scale when you are setting up or editing your photo match. First get the perspective lines up, and then you can move the mouse to the blue axis. The cursor should turn into an up/down arrow, clicking and dragging will change the scale. You need to know the true dimension of something in your photo. Full building height or width is best, but if you have to you can use a smaller object such as a door or window. If your object is too small then any minor flaw in your scaling will make things worse. That is why a large object is best. You can also re-scale the model outside of MatchPhoto by using the measure tool on an object and then typing what you want it to be. You should get a warning "do you want to re-scale your entire model".

V-Ray doesn't support distorted textures. To work around, make the texture unique. (some render engines does this automatically.)

One have to set aspect ratio explicitly in SU2Thea and it has a option to revert back to SU default view. But true it wont notify about side effect if one tries to print while aspect ratio is changed.

The definitely looks like a case where the buildings are slightly lower than the groundplane. You can right click on the axis and choose "reset" if its an option. And that will show you where the true groundplane is. Two ways to fix it. Move all geometry up above the groundplane. OR open the shadows info dialog box and uncheck the box at the bottom for "On Ground". Then SU won't display shadows on the groundplane. Good luck, Chris