Charlie, Thanks. That’s another way that’ll work. The info that comprises shadow information and the way it is stored suggests that unfixing the “fix” or making it optional shouldn’t be that hard to do. When one clicks on a different scene tab, SU should simply use the scene’s stored associated geographical/north arrow information as it did before rather than ignoring it.

Hi, I happened to spot this thread and thought that was a pretty cool leg design......so I had to have a go at it.I've been spending some time working with Shape Bender and FreeScale this weekend. I just downloaded them both and I'm having a blast seeing what's possible. I used a combination of follow me and the FreeScale taper tool to model this leg.The taper went smoothly..........I spent more time just getting the pocket for the table apron. Rich [image: kZNK_curveyleg1.jpg] [image: IZrw_curveyleg2.jpg] curvey leg 3.1.skp

Scott, I am not a MAX user myself, but I understand that there are members of the forum who use the SU/MAX combination successfully. What about the OBJ or FBX formats? I also remember a post by Solo explaining his workflow using Deep Exploration to translate directly from SU to MAX. Anssi

Chris, Wow, thanks a lot, Chris, for your reply and with the speed of light! This is exactly what I was looking for mdlok

Well I loaded and unloaded scripts until the date error disappeared. However, right now I forget what script was the cause. I know that does not help much. I remember that I could not find out what the offending script did. I will look into my old scripts directory when I get home to see if I can find the offending script. Should be home by middle of June. One thing I did learn, that removing a script might make the problem go away, however, reloading the script may not bring back the problem. Right now, I am having problems with and error on components making, I have went though all my scripts, and found that a section of five scripts may remove the problem, note, it doesn't seem to be the same 5 scripts, but removing each one of the five will not give the same results, in other words make the problem go away. It is hard to track down an offending script. Right now, I need to get something done, so I just make sure I make the entry into a group before I make it into a component. My work around this problem. Ken

Also, this is why often, when doing the"modelling" (building) part of the work, with l;arger models it's better to turn textures off completely. If you are in monochrome model, at least you can see what's front and what's back face. This (and a couple of other tricks like turning off shadows or "hide the rest of the model" while working on a detailed component) can speed up work even with a slower computer.

@unknownuser said: we've turned down detail. (on trees etc.) What's the polygon count? Your idea of "low detail" might still be unmanagable for SketchUp. In SketchUp -> Window -> Model Info -> Statistics tab, -> tick the box next to "Show nested components" at the top (drop down menu should also say "Entire model")

Deserving winners if ever there was. Congrats all round

 thank you very much Jeff Hammond, had the problem of visualization on OS X 10.5.6, this would help much. 

Hi h4zel Forceware version 169.21 should certainly work out for you. Google search for this and you'll get the download. I had this same problem with my 8600GT & 8800GT cards in my home & office computers respectively. The problem disappeared after I installed this older version of drivers (Windows XP). Hope this helps. With best regards PRSS

Thanks for the heads up about Deep View! Question though: Anyone know how to create a 3d pdf directly from Deep View via Adobe Acobat Pro Extended? DV directly imports the .skp rather nicely, and it would great if you could simply create the 3d pdf right from DV. However, it seems that you are dependant on MS Office for the 3d pdf creation. While this works ok, you lose the scenes/model views when creating the 3d pdf. Unless I am missing something very obvious. Any ideas are greatly apreciated. C

Thank you for posting that link. It's just what I've been looking for!!! Cheers, domus.

ahe thats it Gaieus, thats the topic i was thinking about and I forgot that it was more of a service you pay for and thats why I never used it. At least now I dont have to pull my hair out trying to find it. Im gonna try a few of the suggestions and see how that turns out. Thanks guys.

already a thread available

Hidden geometry will soon (and often) be your friend. I even have a shortcut for it.

well the bottom is not rounded..only the edges are rounded...but u had the top correct but the roof has to be more stood up...u might wanna look at that sleeper more closely...and get a better view of it..but u have thee idea, it needs to be 48" long, and im not sure how wide..like 102-96 inches wide.

Now-a-days I am not having much problem from autoCAD files imported to SU. Things are quite fine. There is also another trick which came from one of the forums - scale the AutoCAD model - say a 100 times. After importing into SU scale down by 100. You may even scale up to 1000 and then scale down in SU. This sorts out quite a lot of problems in curved surfaces. Also i have tried scaling up by 500 and then export as 3ds with Autosmooth turned off. Then import it in SU and scale down. Use the smoothing option in SU . This way it will be possible to pick the entire surface to apply texture. With best regards PRSS

Open the Model - SKP file. Open the Materials Browser window. Pick the Model tab [little house symbol] Click on the icon of the Material you want to extract. Right-click context-menu gives you options - Save_As... Save as a SKM file with its name - into the Materials folder - I suggest you make a sub-folder for these extracted materials so they are easy to find and manage later on... That Material is now saved as a SUp SKM format file that you can access in any other Model, through the Materials Browser by navigating to the appropriate sub-folder in the Materials folder collection... Repeat this for any Material you want to extract from the Model. You can extract materials from any model and save them in this way as SKM files so that they are re-usable in any other model... If you had picked 'Export Texture Image' instead of 'Save_As' then you wouldn't have got a SKM file saved, you'd get a JPG or PNG file - i.e. the image that the material uses as a texture, extracted back into its original form. There is a Ruby script [fast_tw.rb] that will extract all of a model's texture-images into the model's folder - unfortunately there is no equivalent to bulk extract SKMs. The SKM file is a sort of zip file containing the image, its thumbnail and 3 other xlm documents giving colour data etc... To see this, copy a .SKM to your desktop and change its suffix to .ZIP, now open it in your ZIP-application and you'll see the contents listed. No one has yet worked out how to auto-write all of the model's SKMs out of SUp with Ruby... it will happen. Using pop-out 'Save Library As...' lets you bulk export ALL of the model's SKMs into a new folder...

my biggest gripe with OUtliner is with nested components and being able to hide rest of model, but still reveal the parent of the nested group/component being edited. That seems to me a very easy thing to do, and I mentioned it here a lot, but it doesnt get a lot of play. I guess it's just me. D

There's a couple of good introductory videos on youtube which cover the basics well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LcLPPz0fWM