Hi Pkast, Thanx for the input. I’m still at it, but nothing has ‘struck my fancy’ yet. The current batch of end results tend to be washed out. Or if colorful enough, they are “dry” looking. I tried a few via Akvis Sketch (trial) software. But they also lacked the desired ‘soft wet-ish’ color blend look that appears in Ross’s image. Still experimenting… Thanx, Bob

you can change the color of the lines from black to grey but they will still not be transparent.

Ah, Didier, that is even a more efficient way to assign tranparency. Also, I use groups on just about everything and once you are inside a group the the display of bitmaps "behind" may not be viewable.

Yup, deslecting hardware acceleration sucks big time but surprisingly I have not felt the slowdown. I'm working on several file, one at 7Mb and another at 12Mb and it been smooth so far may be just a tad slow on the resonce but still workable.

thanks, I think I worked it out now. I couldn't find any mention in that guide to clipping masks but I knew what they were so just inverted the texture in photoshop and used that. here's the result: [image: EQLo_goal3.jpg]

That's a pretty interesting read and could be useful for some architectural designs. I would certainly like to get hold of a ruby to help generate that sort of pattern.

As juju says, the Skin.rb will manage that very well. You will probably have to do 2 rings at a time and move along.

Sketchup 6.4.112 Tools Sandbox/ extensions.rb gettingstarted.rb langhandler.rb sandboxtools.rb sketchup.rb totd.rb units.rb Plugins Examples/ Utilities examples.rb utilities.rb azuby

niiicee!! thanks so much

Tom, ...yes something like that. Thanks for the ideas! Best, ~e like your new avatar..btw

Problem solved. I found that the server.dat file was pointing to the old name of the server. When I copied the file from my machine it points to the right license file and now it all works.

thanks very much! works a treat.

I'll have to ask.

Hi Brad, Anssi I'm exporting from sketchup to dwg, then xref-ing these files into Autocad. Whenever I change something in SU, I then re-export the dwg and "refresh" the xref in autocad. The problem is as Anssi says. When my drawing gets larger or smaller in Sketchup, the origin of the exported dwg file changes, so when I refresh in autocad... the xrefs move! Anssi - good idea on setting up the views. Unfortunately, this is the way I have been doing it, so it doesn't solve the problem. Brad - any help you can give on this is much appreciated. It's the fly in the ointment for me at the moment. I'm evaluating the SU/Acad combo as a BIM solution with a view to getting it adopted company wide, and without a fix on this I can't really recommend it. Kind regards Rob D

Hide the Section cut and then export

I can only reiterate what has been said before. Sketchup for speed in conjunction with Rhino for complexity works very well indeed. The new exporter does a pretty good job too.

Ahh... there it is. Thanks Susan & Jeff (& everyone else). I'd tried this off a hunch from posts I'd seen on another issue, but since SU gave showed a message it would take effect for new windows I'd simply re-opened the file (rendering looked different, but still showed the issue). Now that you've confirmed, I changed the setting and then quit & relaunched SU and indeed the issue disappears. Also sadly indeed, it is barely useable in that mode. Guess I can do most of my building/manipulating with the acceleration on, then turn it off for establishing some final views with cuts. Was hoping planes could be more useful for me than that, but maybe with my next computer (since I don't dare imagine Google addressing this older, apparently rather specific hardware issue in future releases). Thanks again everyone. Incredible resource we've got here. --Ben p.s. if anyone is interested in the details, I'm running OS 10.4.11 and Sketchup for Mac 6.4.120 on a 1.42GHZ iBook G4 which the spec says has a 4X AGP ATI Mobility Radeon 9550 with 32 MB of DDR SDRAM

The roller coaster project is officially "over" - it was a gigantic success! Sorry this photo is very poor quality but it gives you an idea what some of the students did. This photo does not show all the roller coasters. Only four groups attempted the Round & Round - it was the most difficult, I think. [image: OLcQ_roller_coasters_010.jpg]

i could do with a converter aswell. use pro6 at work and 5 pro in work. for the times i forget to save as v5, it would come in handy unless anyone will resave for me as v5?.... just have to remember more often...

RpTools, a SketchUp add-on, has a Wizard to let you select a component or other geometry, see its current sizes, enter the desired sizes, and scale it. See: http://forums.renderplus.com/wiki/index.php?title=RpTools#Stretch_Wizard