Hi Dirk, Please, try this "test": go to (menu) Window > Preferences > OpenGL and uncheck hardware acceleration. If the performance is improved, it means that you should find a video driver (i.e. updaet your driver) so that your system can handle OpenGL better. This is a common issue with drivers and Vista and I only hope you can find a driver that solves your problem. If not, kee4p HA off until you find one.

Hi Timetodoit. Since you are using Photoshop see http://sites.google.com/site/3dbasecamp2008/all-sessions-2008/taking-your-models-into-photoshop on how to "render" in PS. Yes printing straight from SU is rough. But also have you tried exporting .png at high resolution and printing that? Still not a rendering but much cleaner. I am looking, like yourself, and checked out Kerkythea, but this is not so simple as loading a Mac app on your Mac. Stopped me, until I can spend time loading and learning the software needed to run it. Looking forward to the Mac Podium.

Ah, well I think I may have reversed the faces, applied the material to that side too then reversed them back again. That could very possibly be the explanation, Biebel.

I don't use other 3d apps too much, so if there is way to clean up SU models, that could be cool. But I think its a common problem where one program that works one way will always export a little bit less than perfect to another program. CAD to SU is another example. It works, but it takes some cleanup in CAD and SU. There are definitely examples of people doing very high poly stuff in SU, then texturing it in SU (I think) and exporting it succesfully to a renderer and getting inredible results. So I wouldn't call it completely useless. But I think it does get a little bit clunky, because of the way faces are turned into triangulated geometry. But for sure there are people who know a lot more aboutt he technical details of this than I do.... Chris

Sounds like a cache-ing problem to me.

Sanjay, you do not appear as though you want to learn how to model this. I may be wrong, but it looks like you want a model creating for you without doing any work yourself. SketchUp is a fantastic tool and you have a Community here willing to help you learn, use this resource and you will have fun.

I got it to work . What I did was select and copy one plant from the pool project and paste it into a new blank sketchup window. The edit functions somehow work normally in this new file and I selected always face camera etc. I copied the altered plant back into the project and all the plants then became editable within the original file. Strange but it works

Hello, Perhaps this is a good place to post my SU Kitchen Modeling Consortium idea. I am not concerned here in opening the SU door to the masses as facilitating SU use for professional designers and architects. With residential remodel design being a large part of my work, I'd like to use SU to present 3d kitchen models in something comparable to that provided by cabinet makers. If professionals worked together online to glean, vet, and share models and systematic modeling methodology, we might make something that is useful to everybody. Agreeing on the quality and impetus of work might be the hardest part among designers. But at least you are not leaving it up to non-designers to ferret out as in 3d Warehouse. The process could start out informally, but of course, it needs a place online to happen. Hope this is not too OT

And sometimes the dirtiest bugs are sold as features Chris

Thats right, nicely summed up. Just to add a bit, SU can handle a max image resolution of 1024x1024, so no textures can be bigger than that.

. Funny that we've been fooling w/ this for a long time and I just assumed it was another undocumented trick. You'll notice tho as you use the Outliner for drag/drop nesting of the clones, that the results are unpredictable (and therefore not really a feature"..;-) Some of our object outlines are 5 or 6 nests deep, but the same behavour occurs even with a simple cluster. Hope that helps, pls let me know when you know...thx again. /Dennis .

Joao, I also have a fancy Logitech mouse whose driver I simply uninstalled (I know there are ways to fix misbehaviours but I didn't need those functions anyway). Also I work with 0 AA settings for during modeling it doesn't really hurt my eyes while on export you can either set AA (this time it's supported by SU, not the graphics driver) as well as you can postprocess and resample your images in PS to get rid of aliasing.

(foot to metre issue) have you checked if in the pop up import dwg window, in the button options, your unit is the same of your cad file? It's a different thing of the units in the SU file itself. you're actually leting the SU know the units of your cad file...

I remember this coming up years ago and the problem was the heavy cost of licensing for the use of caramel's raspberry!

@watkins said: I find the thread textures very useful for reminding which are tapped and which are clearance holes. All too true. This is a common deficiency of many 'exploded' diagrams, distributed as instructions. I've depicted such by copying the circle multiple times, at small intervals, to represent threads. I suspect no one will count them, nor measure the pitch, nor notice that it's not a helix. I wonder which is less memory-intensive, 'image texture' threads, or multiple circles? Taff

One caution to using high segment counts for arcs and circles. You can very rapidly bloat the file size and degrade computer performance that way. Keep in mind that once you've made a change in the segment count for the model, it will remain at that setting. While you might want a high segment count for the edge of a table or counter top, you probably won't for a bullnose or other rounded profile. If the curve is small, you won't notice that it is made of a small number of segments. You probably won't need to set the segment count anywhere close to 1000 for the appearance of a smooth curve. Maybe around 100 would be plenty.

Thanks Mike, its not actually my issue though, the initial person who posted was someone else. I saying that I think their problem was cured in a new patch released by SU a while back. Then I was asking you if you had a similar problem, or if you were just trying to help troubleshoot. So I see you're just helping, and not experiencing a similar dilema. So all's well that ends well. I am guessing thier problem has been fixed. If anyone else has similar troubles, make sure you are using the most recent version of SU available. Thanks Mike, Chris Fullmer

@watkins said: Dear Chris, Thanks for the explanation. I too came from the drawing board world, and then AutoCAD, but for some reason it took me ages to get used to 3D modelling (something about how my brain works). Even now I only use a fraction of Inventor's capabilities. For me Sketchup has replaced both the drawing board and 2D layouts in AutoCAD. I now go straight to Sketchup. I have been pleased to find that I can export from Inventor (as a .sat file) and then import into Sketchup via AutoCAD (after scaling up by x 100 inside AutoCAD). As yet I have not found a way to import Sketchup files into Inventor. Did you see my thread textures post? You might find the textures useful (they are in the Materials and Styles section). I have attached part of an assembly I'm working on as an example of how I use Sketchup. I've been doing solid modeling since the mid 90's and my experience is generally the more capable a designer is with AutoCAD the longer it takes to really embrace the power of designing in 3D. In the past it was always the 'young bucks' who came quickly up to speed while the grizzled veterans often times really struggled to get their heads around it. That's a very impressive model. The discipline you learned in Inventor shows in the model. I'm amazed at how haphazardly some models are assembled. Have you created a fastener library? What I see as a major drawback of SketchUp is the lack of technical quality hardware models. Saying that though, we certainly created a lot of our own in the early days of Pro-E and SolidWorks. Have a look at the stl exporter from Didier Bur in the Ruby section. I use it to export models into SolidWorks, but I don't know if Inventor supports stl file import or not. SolidWorks certainly doesn't do it very elegantly. chris

Yeah, the model would be fine. Also I'm not sure your path is a 2D or 3D curve (in 3D SU gets screwed).

@unknownuser said: Another way to change it is to grab you zoom tool and hold down shift. Now start mouse click and drag. This way you can change your field of view dynamically. This is also most often the way people incidentally screw up their FOV and not knowing what they've done (and how to revert it) drives them nuts