I've managed to match the photos close enough now. I took some extra time to model some extra surrounding buildings for reference and ensure their height was correct. That helped alot.

I don't use PhotoMatch to model buildings or extract textures from, just to get the correct perspective for the model so I can drop it into Photoshop and then work on it from there.

Evey project I work on is different so a generic background model would be very difficult to achieve.
Are you wanting high levels of detail or just massing models?

You could use pre made buildings such as the ones here at FormFonts (subscription required)
http://www.formfonts.com/search.php?area=Models&query=buildings

It is possible to create a photomontage by placing your model into a photgraph of the surrounding area.
There are many ways but we would need more specific details to give better information.

Reflection is not possible in SketchUp. There are workarounds however like in this topic.

http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/RUBY_Library_Depot.htm

You will find there a ruby which set shadows automatically at 45° from the left
Marc

Its certainly a strange problem, and i think its must vary with the amount of memory youve got available, as toxic suggess.

I just had a quick play around and managed to export up to about 4500 with AA on, also had the task manager open at the same time, and SU does use a load of memory when exporting these big pics.

I also have had this happen but as said earlier, this will have no effect (that I have found) to the final product. Even during rendering the skylights render fine.

Scott

I would go for the largest monitor you can get your hands on. I recently bought two 24" Soyo LCD's that make my life much easier. Less scrolling and switching. 😍 One is at home working in duet with my Dell laptop. The other is in the office next to a 16" diagonal CRT. The Soyo has a brightness number of 1000 and resolution of 1920x1200. Very bright and very sharp. Makes the detail jump for my old eyes.

I'd love to jump up to Solo's 42"

screen- shot.jpg

Thanks Remus. I will pass that along.

@remus said:

To subscribe, you need to go to your user control panel and then go to the user groups tab. You thne just select the one you want to sign up for. Weirdly it only lets you sign up for one at a time.

Thanks, Remus. I was busy getting fired off a job the last few weeks, so I didn't catch that.

Thank you for your advice....ciao

You might be able to assign a different shortcut for the 'cancel operation' thing which would mean youd be able to put it closer to the spacebar, which is select arrow by default.

This maintenance release only targeted Mac version.

No problem Spence. Have a look around, they have some other pretty useful scripts there.

thanks a lot. I didnt know how to use the "Expand" command.
doesnt really help me though, because I am permanently changing the model, thus adding and deleting components every other minute.

but the expand-function is definitely something that needs to show up in SketchUp 7 for components created within the current file - preferably with a sort of tree structure, that enables you to easily retrace the parented component. of course thats something close to an outliner then. well, I hope they will think about that and surprise us with something increddibly useful... 😄

Well, Bob, some say they experience slower performance with SU6 - others say SU6 is faster. For animation some still use SU4 because there they had a (temporary) fix for the irritating shadow flickering. I started with SU5 (free) and only purchaesed the Pro license when SU6 came out so there are many pro features I cannot compare (most of these features are now included into the free version, too).

But that's a different story - at the end we'll end up hijacking Tom's thread...

Hi Yaakov,

It is very important to set the gluing plane correctly. To do this, when createing a component, there is an option to set the axes. When it's a "glue-to" component, there won't be a z axis for it (just a blue cross) but setting the red and then green axes correctly on the plane you want to cut the opening is essential.

As a quick workaround to make life easier, I usually start making my glue-to/cut-hole components on a single, vertical plane (using it as a drawing board) and in this case the gluing plane tends to be created on this plane and I don't have to manually set it.

Hi Dave,

In the vieo driver settings you should set AA to be controlled by the application (i.e. by SU in this case). However OpenGL settings will only affect the screen appearance of the model what's more, the lower AA settings you choose from the OpenGL settings in SU, the better performance you may achieve with bigger models (although as a woodworker, you may not have extremely big and complex models like a landscape designer with lots of 3D trees for instance).

The 2D raster export is not controlled by the OpenGL settings but by SU itself. When exporting, you should be able to set AA in the options dialogue. If this does not work however, there must be a problem.

a workaround may be what Alan (Fraser) does in practice; export with a higher (say double) resolution and scale your image down in PS (or equivalent) using AA settings there. Actually he prefers this way of exporting / post-processing to straight SU+AA export.

However if you export at 3000 pixels already, exporting at 6000 may be a bit too much. 😲

I'm afraid there's no way you can turn inference off. You can set (turn off) length and degree snapping in the preferences but that won't turn off inference to axes and geometry in general.

My default file is a blank slate - just greenish gray ground and blue sky, located in Knoxville.

Just make sure you have a face selected while adding the shortcut since the whole path doesn't exist in the shortcut list otherwise. I needed some time to figure this out and wanted to save you that minutes 😄 ....