Jeff, I can see the faceting of curves in Sketchup as being a big issue. It is to me as well. My background is mechanical engineering and I have used many different CAD systems over the years. All of them used true arc and circles so this was never an issue. Of course they also had filleting (Corner Curves) which could easily solve your problem in one step. All could create a fillet between two lines, arc and line, or two arcs. In your case it would be between the left arc and the horizontal line at the bottom right. All that said I wonder about your need for accuracy in this case. In the real world everything has a tolerance and not suprisingly when you start to build things over 6 to 10 feet your measuring tools start to throw their own errors into the mix. For instance how accruate do you think a tape measure is? Sag, flex, temperature, material and other factors add to the issue. This is why in building construction an error of 1/8 inch is an everyday occurance. Aerospace is the only industry I know of that has addressed the problem with any success. They are starting to use a new technology called indoor GPS. This uses infraRed lasers mounted around the ceiling with the receiver in a hand held measuring tool. The user takes hits on the object to be measured and the 3D coordinate data gathered is uploaded and overlaid on the original CAD model. Boeing developed it.

thanks! i'll do that!! UPDATE: it worked perfectly.... i scaled it up 10x, performed the followMe and voila! then back down to normal size. [image: 0zrl_lamp.jpg]

Read this sticky on the top of this forum about hoqw to run both on the same machine (that's how I could test it, too - interestingly, I have just deleted the desktop icon of SU 7.0 today so I had to dig for it in my Program files folder.) http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=22158

Interesting place. One always wonders how these "sacred areas" have been inherited through ages and cultures. @aerilius said: ...At least I would like better camera control (sometimes the camera fails to show placemarks with a flat angle to the ground) Yes, always be careful not to shoot a very close angle to the ground in SU because that can drive GE nuts. Best is to set the cameras in GE.

SOAP does look interesting but what I'm going for is having an interactive color choice system for all of our models and it seams like with SOAP it would have to be set up specific to each model and we just don't have the time to invest in setting up SOAP every time. furthermore, I need to supply the user with a list of eight color choices, not allow them an infinite number of choices. Thanks for the suggestion though

Great -- that did it. Scaling resolved the problem completely (the final diameter of the rod is only 5mm). Thanks! David.P

Thanks Rocky & Gaieus, amazing -- this of course did the trick even better. Cheers David.P

Neat result for classical tehcnic

Never mind - I was also "enlightened" by a Google employee when I first put my hand on SU 7 last year.

alright..see what i can do heres how it came out i think it came out alright.. [image: yUFH_petemirrors09.jpg]

Hummm, why not...I just have to immerse myself in sketchyphysics...I'm gonna try it, thanks for the idea pilou.

@unknownuser said: i might be misunderstanding so... Nice tutorial! You understood. Actually, I'm working on my tutorial's Ruby section and I want to suggest that this is a good example of a deceptively simple drawing that is really helped by having a Ruby. Using this is easier: [image: PdVW_roofster.gif]

And in the Shadows dialog, check "Use sun for shading". Now the amount of shading can be controlled by the Light and Dark sliders. Dark=100%>no shading. Anssi

@unknownuser said: i'm on a quad mac and do not have the slowness either.. SU is very responsive until i get into very high polycount territory.. when you say it runs slowly, are you talking only about how long it takes to open a file or are there other issues as well? most of my skps open instantly (no noticeable pause at all).. files with a lot of textures/poly (25MB+) take maybe a second or two to open.. you may have something set up weird or SU may be running normally.. it's hard to tell because i'm not quite sure what you mean by 'slow' I may well have something wrongly setup. It took me quite a while to discover that the Open GL option "Use fast feedbaback" was troublesome with the nVidia video card on the Windows machine. But stopwatch in hand, importing a 76 KB skp component into a 34 MB drawing takes 30 seconds on the Mac against 7 seconds on the laptop. Opening the 34 MB file on the Mac is faster than on the Windows machine (40 sec, against 50 sec), probably due to the newer, faster hard disk. Movement lag when orbiting is about the same on both machines. And sometimes drawing on the Mac seems to get somewhat sluggish (no measurements yet). I am evaluating the possibility of using large single files for projects, originating any number of views and cuts. Modifications of the base file can be automatically updated in Layout, avoiding a lot of work and the possibility of errors.

i think you would need to make your ground plane the same proportions as your image ie: 1024x768, which is 4:3 so it could be 100' x 75' for example. then when you create a new material in SU make sure to type these dimensions into the create material hieght width boxes before you select your image. paint the ground plane the you can scale it (make sure you scale uniform) and move it to fit your scene.

@honoluludesktop said: I was thinking about b-splines, loft, and other similar 3d modeling tools. if you need feature based NURBS modeling go for ViaCAD 3D which is avail. for a handful of bucks even for OSX and with SU import too. hth, Norbert

Hi Solo, Just trying to be creative, and didn't check if the following was previously posted. In the first model, create the desired scene, delete all, and save as a new file name. Then open the new file, find the drawing origin, and import the second model into it (on the origin), and go back to the scene as necessary. Worked on a small example, didn't try with anything big.

@solo said: Another example of how I do it [image: terrainpasting.jpg] hi!..a have a little question. The top view of the mountain, that texture, you did´t all whit Photoshop? Tks for the help!

Don't worry, I didn't know the answer until a couple weeks ago when I saw a post by Gaieus linking to it.

I worked CA with Mortenson as the contractor on a couple of projects way back in the day (actually had a hand in the hand drawings for the project it was so long ago :`) and they were quite progressive back then...this extensive use of SU doesn't surprise me a bit.