@daniel said: I usually model everything in the default layer 0, but always put cars, people, and trees in their own layers so they can be turned off while modeling other things. ditto

Thanks for the responses. I suggested to my client that she investigate the equipment before the presentation. I gave her jpegs 300dpi 10" (inches) wide. Glenn

there is a very good script written by didier bur (Layer Manager) that can save layer states, that is, different groups of scenes that you can invoke at will. it does much more that that, of course. it is really worth a look. and it comes with a great user guide.

More on this thread.

Apologies the for the delay in the response. Think you may be right Dave. There were a few splines within the drawing that contained varying amount of segments. It appears that those that had many short segments were the ones that did not show within the styles. On running the 'weld' script on the splines to make them one polyline in SU, they appear in the style, thanks Dave!

@unknownuser said: Great topic Dave! I also have TBD's Time Track but suffer from not start/stopping it correctly so it becomes a little ineffective due to user error! There are a few useful tips here though which I can try. Dylan, second time today we agree on something. Most of the time I recount the activities of the day and jot down the modeling time.

Hi BigStick, I don't use a HackMac. I was just mentioning the article that I read on the subject. As I understand it, Mac OX is not to be used on anything other than Apple hardware as per the Conditions of Use. I completly understand your thinking on the subject. Apple ALSO switched! They moved to Intel chips. I imagine one of the reasons for doing this was to bring in the fence sitters, I was one. They seriously cannot expect people that cannot afford to spend the extra 30 - 50% on an original Mac to stay away from Mac OSX! IMO, technically there would be no theft involved but again Terms of Conditions / Use are there! I fail to see how they can do anything about it except maybe in the auto updates area. If Apple opened the doors back in the '80s we might all be using Macs or Mac Compatibles now ..... maybe Mike

You ought to be able to get a solid background colour as Susan says...by turning off both the sky and ground in Styles, then setting whatever colour you like as a background.

Thank you both for taking the time to answer..Tom, you suggestion worked perfect.. Richard

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" [image: CBkH_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.