Really nice in deed!. Thanks a lot, Alan. Regards from Spain : Antonio.

Thanks Tom, Simple and clean. I have used the actual fixtures on a project before, and they perform well. Bytor

Hi Barry. It is weird that you are experiencing no peculiarities. With the latest and greatest 10.5.3, I was experiencing very bad orbiting on a model with 42,000 faces. If I edited it as a component with 5 or 6 copies, it would lag terribly. If I selected a large portion of the model, I also got very laggy performance. Yes, the orbit tool has always worked with no problems for me, too; I am referring to orbiting by holding down the middle mouse button. I did not double click anything, it is just that the orbiting performance seemed to improve if I set the double click delay to longer. Truth be told, I was having worse performance today, with the latest OS than I was with 5.2. Thanks!

XP? If so r-click desktop/Properties/Setting/Advanced/Troubleshooting. Set hardware acceleration to none. Try SU. If you can get in, reassess OpenGL settings. Was fast feedback checked? If so, that could have been the real problem once hardware acceleration was checked. If you are on Vista, the OS does not support OpenGL. The driver is everything.

Now-a-days I am not having much problem from autoCAD files imported to SU. Things are quite fine. There is also another trick which came from one of the forums - scale the AutoCAD model - say a 100 times. After importing into SU scale down by 100. You may even scale up to 1000 and then scale down in SU. This sorts out quite a lot of problems in curved surfaces. Also i have tried scaling up by 500 and then export as 3ds with Autosmooth turned off. Then import it in SU and scale down. Use the smoothing option in SU . This way it will be possible to pick the entire surface to apply texture. With best regards PRSS

thanks fred, will give that a go in a minute! pav (luciano)

very very nice dear......

No, not really. It's just a little bit unclear. Wasn't trying to be silly. basketball stars

Some beautiful geometry there Mr. Red. Actually it is possible to get a reasonable approximation of rope or other helical structures just using an image mapped to a cylindrical extrusion. It gets a little dodgy on the tighter curves, but in a large model serve its purpose pretty well. Link

thanks so much fred, you are a legend. pav

As Remus said, all these (and more) video tutorials have already been linked to the sticky in the Newbie forum. Yet anyone who finds new resources of SU tutorials or help pages, please, let us know and we'll add them to our "link database" there. Ah yeah, and I also have Aidan Chopra's "SketchUp for Dummies". Excellent book for a beginner and is supported by his video tuts mentioned above.

Maybe moderators should open a section Tin? The new art Su morphologic

@unknownuser said: Fred, as these TIN models you have been posting are not tutorials I have moved them to the Component section. : Eric, That makes sense. Thanks for finding the right place for them. Fred

@sintra said: ...Also how do i turn off AA in sketchup ? ... Go to Window > Preferences > OpenGL settings and there you can turn hardware acceleration on/off and when it's on, at the bottom you have a couple of options to set (depending on the driver, several AA settings, too). Experiment with them to find a good balance between performance and look.

Thanks for all the help! This forum is really great, I must say! So many people trying to help others out with problems. I hope I can someday return the favor, but for now I'm just a newb! BTW, My skatepark is slowely coming along. Typical problems of fustration, but I did have a few breakthroughs recently. Sometimes the skin tool works and sometimes it doesn't, for me any how. When I master this and controlling the bezier curve's axis, I will be golden! Sometimes you draw a curve and realize that it went a different direction. I feel guides and referencing off of other objects make it easier. Also, I think if I group objects that are completed and delete guides I'm finished with, will make life easier. Thanks to all!

@pixero said: I use Vray for SketchUp at work and I get all the "old" PCs to put them in a renderfarm. Actually they are not that old and this way I can speed up rendering a LOT even on single images. Works great. But you have to do some work in Vray before running the animation right? I suspect if you don't mess w/ the materials and lighting and such it would look odd. I basically want the exact same sort of output that sketchup would give me. -Brodie

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 ....