Over the years I've printed very little direct from SU. That changed recently as I started working in an office that has a nice colour laser printer and I love seeing the colour output.

The mistake I was making for a while with printing related to the size of my modelling window vs. the print area. I was finding my printed models to be small relative the paper. Eventually I realized that my dimwitted mistake was in thinking 'stretch to fit' (or whatever the printer drivers call it) would make my model fit. What I was forgetting about was the print is the entire modelling window and not just the model. So with a big monitor with lots of floating tool panels open I might just have my view of the actual model taking up less than half of the overall modelling window. On printing it is the entire window that prints. As I often work with a white background and sky & ground turned off, it isn't always very obvious why the model printed so much smaller than expected.

Now what I do is before printing I resize my window and think of it as a cropping or framing tool to determine exactly what I want to print.

Regards, Ross

P: Ross at work

Ah, I see, you meant for plan views, like AutoCAD does. That would be a tricky one to implement as as soon as you orbited out of the plan view the re-aligned selection box would become more of a hindrance than a help.

An effective workaround is to save a scene which is a rotated plan view of the skewed bit of the overall plan which you can switch to and then pan around when you need to make a selection.

Glenn,

I just drew arcs and rotated them a little bit to "bend down" on one end then just copied the whole thing onto the other end.
Add the poles separately.

Doh, I understand now. thanks so very much. Of course, it is totally obvious when someone else has thought of it. Thanks again.

feel free to contact me at sketchup-house-plans.com and I can set you up with some space to work on this... and perhaps help.

standards would be realisim...

a sheet of plywood should cover 4'x8' with out repeating the pattern or should look correct when repeating...

wood trim should be narrow and long, and should have tight graining.

a cross section of wood should be just that, a cross section, and the outside of wood or the long grain should be just that...

yeah I could get into this.

Heh, I've even grown to use my 30 minute autosaves to alert me to how long I've been working at a model.

P: Cyberdactyl

You can right click on a component's thumbnail in the dialogue and choose "Properties" (or choose the edit tab) to edit it. There you can change its guing options, too.

Also, if you have any problem with the component axes, by right clicking a component, you can choose "Change axes" if you need to change them.

BTW I am moving this topic for the "Component forum" is meant for sharing components...

thanks for the link ... for those interested in more sketchup work,you can download the construction drawings on each project page...lots of interesting stuff.
also there was a good coverage of this exhibition on both treehugger.com and inhabitat.com if you want to see more pics ...

Hi Guys, I have attached a file of what i was trying to achieve. Thanks to you all, I managed to work it out!!

I wanted to build a 'stick' model of a building but have the abilitiy to show doors / windows in plan even though only a single plane model. As you can appreciate, if a door or window is cut through it will appear as a continuous line thickness unless manipulated.
I have nested door swing components and the glass in the windows as a component so i can turn them off in plan view so i get a good contrast between the section cut settings and the profile line below.
Then in 3D view turn the glass back on and turn off door swings.....you dig?

Thanks again, much appreciated.

A

componentscomponentscomponents.skp

to size the window proportions right for any exporting, i usually go to the export jpeg options menu, set the desired width, then keep resizing your sketchup window until the desired depth appears (guess and check style). Very annoying! anyone have a work around?

kannonbal, your trick is pretty good 😃 but still doesn't let you set the window to the exact proportion you need. It would be nice if you could do it all in sketchup.

Pixero,

The only thing that comes to mind right off hand is checking to see if you have permission to run ActiveX controls. If that's not the problem, then I was wondering if you could zip up your PowerPoint and applet and send them to me to check out (my email address is listed below). I'm sure that we can work this out, I just need more information to go on.

Abe Megahed
CTO, Hypercosm
megaheda <AT> hypercosm.com
(608) 229-2829

awesome!

P: lrsuser

Thanks,

We will make sure we get the name for Layer0 (Calque0) from the layer list itself.

kris, this is a great idea, equivalent to turning parts of a project on and off to keep a file as light as possible.

i will use next time. now all i want is to finish this damn competition! thanks.

Sounds like the image is bigger than the plane you placed it on.
I usually create a flat surface and add the texture. I then 'resize' the surface to fit the image, i.e instead of the multiple tiled images you get. I then group it and 'rescale' it to fit the model.

thanks, jeremy. it worked.

about the weekend, the same to you. we are finishing a competition and having fun with renders and what not.

Lots of very good input here. I have faith in the new forum looking excellent.

I was also a fan of the look of the old forums also, they where nice and streamlined with a professional look.

This is an example of how to do it using my Grow.rb script...

GrowHelix.skp

Incredible... feels like I'm there.

great post Abe... thanks for sharing...

anyone else?

@unknownuser said:

Maybe you need one of those brain defrag's Tomsdesk was talking about. So do I.

SOunds good. Where can I get one of those?
😆