I'm with tinanne... Personally I leave the sky to white (like in SU5) and then I might use a background sky-image, a sky-dome or a style... In my latest project I used the Instant Watercolour 2 made by Ross Macintosh... [image: 1Bft_Scene3-Water2.jpg]

Under your texarea (while typing), there are two tabs. One is "Options" the other is "Attachments".

As for Google Earth and SU (hope this isn't too off topic), the Kmz and Collada SU exports make this easy. Commercially though, providing a Google Earth building modelling service is tricky. There are 2 significant obstacles that I hope Google will eventually address; Most clients wants to see their properties appear instantaneously and permanently on Google Earth, the 3d warehouse route does not guarantee this, if your model is approved, it can take months to show up on GE and then it is only in "the best of 3d warehouse" layer, it may never appear in the default building layer. Google want quality but surely the easy way to get quality is to make the modelling service commercially viable. Second Life, Twinity, Virtual Earth allow instant upload. 2.Google Earths policy on what is classed as unacceptable advertising is unclear. I cannot find out if it is acceptable for a 3d building to have a corporate logo on the side of it.

richcat thanks! That solved the problem.

@remus said: i think the autosave fature is only there to cover your back if SU crashes or your PC crashes. Although it deletes it to the recycle bin, so go through your recycle bin and it should be there! rem Thanks Remus. I feared thought it would be something like that. Unfortunately i was working on a file on the sever, hence no recycling bin! Regards, Sanio

Nigel, I've created a tutorial for you here: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=4208 Cinderella - you will go to the Ball !!! ... Hope this helps Howard L'

Well Tom, two years I worked for a builder/developer and that is exactly how I would do it. The plans and elevations would get developed and finished and then I would build a 3D model for use as marketing material. Sure with SU you can do the model 1st or the other way around. It just depends on which way you want to go. No right or wrong, just find the way that works best for you.

monsterzero> A dbl side by side old stage coach shotgun is what Im trying to make..What are you going to make? Thanks for the video..You should know that it would help to be on speed to watch it, it's so fast..

Good, glad to hear that.

Yes, I also read posts about the beta tes going on then. What I wrote about the accidental uploads to the WH does not necessarily mean though that there is beta testing already. It can even be in an "alpha" phase - just tested by the SU Folks. Guys you know that if a SU7 beta test were already on, people would most probably "find out" soon though probably not the details.

jbacus, strange that shortcut (edit/context menu flyout/zoom extents) doesn't work for me. I just get the mac error sound when I hit the key. Strange. The menu itself works.

That's a handy ruby, thanks. I often export the my sketchup models to 2d AutoCAD drawings, particularly at the concept stage of the project.

Okay, Gaieus. Thanks for the data. Danty

That was an interesting tutorial, what I am referring to however is meshing prior to export, not after import. If I make a plane with curves in it in Sketchup, selecting 'hidden geometry' shows nothing except for the plane boundary. When you export however, a rendering program then shows the massive triangulation (or not so massive, depending on the vertices in the curves specified in Sketchup)that Sketchup has decided as the best way to polygon the surface. The imported mesh model that is shown on the clip is optimized as far as uniform distribution and shape of the polygons...a model created in Sketchup never has this uniform distribution, that is what I was hoping to be able to do, create a uniform mesh in Sketchup prior to export. You can manually divide the plane into a more uniform distribution of polys by simply adding lines, but unfortunately then your texture UV mapping controls only work on the individual manually created polys and not the plane as a whole...really ugly.

That's a pretty useful tid-bit Jordan, thanks for sharing.

You might check some of your SU settings. The 2Gb of ram should do nothing but improve your situation. How are you erasing lines? Using the erase tool, the eraser, the delete key after highlighting or using Undo? Do you have the same settings in the Preferences:Drawing:Clickstyle are the same as what you are used to? The program can seem very odd if you have settings here that differ from what you are "used" to. Personally I go for the click drag click approach. If you are in the midst of drawing using the "continue line drawing" checkbox it will want to keep on with the line tool until you change tools manually (in my experience which is why I don't use it) as the program just sees you as being between two endpoints after each click. As for the printing. When you print, is the whole of what you want to print visible on the screen? The way SU works is it prints what is within the bounds of the window, not the entirety of the model or model space. When you say SU doesn't play well with Firefox or Opera, what do you mean? I almost always have Safari and FF running while I am also running SU, Vectorworks, Graphic Converter, Edrawings and so on with no ill effects. Looking forward to your responses. All the best. Karl

I think he is referring to particles in the air (dust,humidity,etc..), that cause refraction and reflection of light, thus causing the 'volumetric' effect (beams or cones of light). Most of the time,volmetric light is 'mimiced' by modelers/render engines ,as the polycount of real particles can be troublesome..... Cheers, Kwistenbiebel

Script published here: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=153&t=3848 Hope it helps,

Thanks for the ideas. 1. Pasting components with mateirals I just tested pasting a component which had materials with the same name as materials already in my model. It renamed the old materials using square braces. 0001_PaleVioletRed - was in my model already [0001_PaleVioletRed]1 - was the renamed, pasted material So it looks like were going to have to modify the code which checks for carets to check for square braces as well. 2. SU 5 models I downloaded the original model from the 3D Warehouse. When I load it in SU 5 - it has no carets on material names When I load it into SU 6 - all material names have carets. I tried a new SU 5 model, and the same thing happens when you load it into SU 6. Again, thanks for your ideas on this - it put me on the right track.

@unknownuser said: If you increase the number of segments in your cylinder (and the squished sphere as well) you'll get a smoother look. Thanks - that's great advice and helps . . . just a word of advice to the other newbs like me - DO NOT set the number of circle sides to 2000 - NO! Use lower values, closer to 100, or so. Happy modeling, Brad [image: 5yET_bw_egg_slicing_001.jpg]