Its pretty heavy going, but its also worth reading/browsing the SU users manual. Theres loads of stuff in there about everything to do with SU, so its good as a reference if nothing else.

that one is really cool! so I dont have to plunder my bank accound after all. I can model the object of desire in half an hour and dive into wonderful daydreams, looking at my new computer (I am afraid though, that after some hours of dreaming I will spend all my money anyway...)

ah, I see. so blue may not be the ideal colour if you (like me at the moment) work with an old and fairly bad laptop screen - violet and blue are too much alike. thanks for the info, Alan

There are two or three things here that are worth mentioning: When you apply an image on a face and apply the same image on its reverse, the latter one is always flipped (or mirrored). This is particularly useful and essential when you apply semi transparent images to create 2D plants for instance. Without this feature you'd always keep manually flipping them all the time a simple face drawn on the xy plane shows its reverse face upwards because SU presumes that that's going to be the bottom of any structure you are going to build on top (above the ground level). And unless you use the PP tool, it's correctly oriented since it will be facing inside. In fact, the PP tool is the "exception" because when you start to use it, it flickers a little bit until "realises" that you are going to push/pull that face up and immediately - very smartly - decides to leavi it like that (the flickering actually being the new face and the old one z fighting a bit). Orient faces work best when there is just a simple volume surrounded by the faces (i.e. no wall thickness, no faces that may face either this way or the other etc.). Once you have several volumes combined together, SU may not be able to decide what is outside and what is not. Try a simple test: Draw a rectangle PP it up to a certain hight now Ctrl+PP it up to another height (leaving a face in between). This face is a single face and how SU should be able to decide that when orienting faces, where it should orient? Click on any of the outside faces and choose orient faces. You'll see the screwed up result.

Tom Thanks for the lower poly model, it will look good from higher viewpoints. Its horses for courses. 1 Very close in - model individual tiles/slates 2 Low angle (medium distance) - use modelled roof (ie mine) 3 higher angle (medium distance to infinity (and beyond!)) - use material only This has got me re-thinking roofs, as you have now modelled the eaves boxing etc. why not take another step and also model the gutter. I keep adding gutters seperately and modelling them into this component will save time (I may also model the brackets while I'm at it!) David

thanks dlsf, I will let you know what difference it makes..... Cheers,

Hi Howdy, hi folks. Try going to your Keyboard/Mouse Control panel and set the middle button (scroll wheel) as button number 3. This is how my Apple cordless Mighty Mouse is set. Just ideas.

Hello. Does anybody have an idea on how to model such a "net" bridge ? My last tentatives are not really convincing. How it should be ... [image: ScbB_net-bridge.jpg] I am looking for green bulding models (contrast in between industrial and natural architecture, plantwall, greenroof, organic design) I could get inspired by and this legally. It is just for "presentation" of the overall park and not to "sell" the model. Anyway we can manage and agreement if the model is on purpose and could be more than an example. Thanks.

now you made me really curious! I use the outliner of course to keep an overview over large models. I am aware of the possibility to group/explode or make component within the outliner. I also know, that you can select a number of entities and hide or lock them. but are there some other tricks I do not know yet. now I am eager to find out more (to grasp the true potential of that little inconspicuous window)

Also you can find the "culprit" endpoint by using the text label tool on the corners. Whichever doesn't say 0 for the blue axis (for example - in case of a horizontal rectangle) will be the one that prevents you from creating a face. You may need to adjust precision to some higher value in the Model info box. To fix this, make sure nothing is selected, hover over the wrong point with the move tool, click on it when the inference appears, hit the up/down arrow on your keyboard and move it to 0 z value (by inferencing with any of the correct corner points). Also note that SU has some kind of "tolerance" so you may even create a face with non coplanar edges (see example file - the face is created though the corner point farmost from the origin is 0.01 cm higher than the others - start push-pulling it up and see that the vertical edges lose their z-axis marking blue colour at about 3300 cm high). So you never know... Non-planar.skp

Fred thanks, I delved into the SketchUp 5 book last night and read up on TINs etc; I have to admit to being a little shy of the Sandbox tools.... thanks again! greg v.

SketchUp is fully capable of doing so. (Wrong term though -- SketchUp uses 'drape' to describe something else. If you're searching the Users Guide, you don't want to search on that term.) You want to 'project' a texture onto the terrain surface. This is described in one of the Google video tutorials here: http://sketchup.google.com/gsu5vtvideos.html (#12, "Using images as signs") I've produced several textured terrains with projection, including a tutorial: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=2ff3fe050d0f83a549a70958796b8e8&num=50&scoring=d Hopefully, one of these models provides the help you need. Regards, Taff

One sure fire way is to scale your model up (factor of 10 or 100?) as I think you're pressing the envelope with SU precision working at such small scale.

Hi, It seems you need XrefManager script don't you ? -> Add Xrefs and Manage Xrefs, Autocad-like tools to insert and manage external references within SketchUp. Version 5, requires -win32ole.so- in the Plugins folder. Documentation included. d/l here: http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/em_fil_page.htm

Thanks. . .I appreciate it. I knew it was inthere, I just couldn't find it.

Hi, Download dashes.rb here: http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/em_arc_page.htm It may help you.

Thanks for the tip on the massmaterialimporter. I have been looking for something that would do that.

SU will remember the last import settings you used. Anssi

Nothing new, but more of a reitteration based on my findings which have mainly been w/ the brick textures. Image resolution does help but it seems to be on a decreasing scale. So rendering small images will make the affect horrible. If you do images about the size of your monitor it'll be quite a bit better. But after you get past about 2000 pixels in either width or height it doesn't seem to make as much difference. The biggest difference comes from changing the scale. Make the scale as large as you can without making it so big it's obvious the scale is way off. This is also a much better option for animations since you don't want to just try and solve the problem by making ginormous image files. I haven't really tested it much but it seems logical that you'd want to use .png or tiff files since they aren't compressed like a jpg. I usually combine all of these things. Scale the texture up, have SU render a bunch of png files at 29.97 fps at a nice big size (twice the size I'll end up with is pretty ideal), then use Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 to put them into an animation. -Brodie

I only know about it because I of a ruby script, written/adapted for use with Podium, that is based on that ruby AFAIK.