Thanks Rich, Great help and can think of a few more applications for this method.

Thanks kaas. It works like a charm.

@pbacot said: Wait another week or so. When the ball drops?

@jonathonlt said: and LAYOUT... .Jon.. And of course if you are using SketchUp for anything more than hobby use, you would have Pro and thus LayOut.

@hornoxx said: :thumb: yes, a cool model idea and video tutorial indeed - thanks for sharing !! would you mind to post your raw model here or on 3d warehouse?? I wold like to try exactly this exeecise too Best I find the railing model from warehouse by searching "railing", you can find very nice models by this search.. I upload my exercise file to mediafire, you can download.. A little gift is in it.. May be ı forget to unhide, so make all models visible by unhide all.. http://www.mediafire.com/file/myvpm5pbj34f77m/Merdiven.rar

This bug stays unfixed for decades (in Adobe\Trimble) products. People can't use Layout for this reason. REALLY sucks!

An update. The cause of this problem appears to be a folder or filename starting with a lowercase 'u'. I am grateful to the person who described this on this or another forum (couldn't find the post again) and Yogesh at SU support. I didn't think this was what was causing the problem on my setup as I knew that I never name files or folders with lowercase letters. However, the culprit was further up the file path in the C:\ directory thus: C:\ Users\ user. It was this last folder name with its lowercase 'u' that was at the heart of the problem. How the folder came to be there (in the SU file path) I do not know. I think I probably messed up right at the start when naming my desktop account on the new PC (three years ago now). My solution has been to do a reset of the whole PC, which it needed anyway, and then being careful about names and file paths. SU support say they accept this problem as a known bug so there may be a fix at some point without going to the lengths of resetting or meddling with the PC inner workings. Hope this may explain what is happening for anyone else who has the problem but apologies for not being able to offer a quick fix.

oh it seems that one can't change a component attributes when multiple selected

Now you'll have to find some other reason to sing the blues. Did you dog run off and leave you, maybe?

@pilou said: When your volume is done You have 2 free renders programs directly inside SketchUp Visualizer (for 2015-2016) Real time render! You can't find more easy! A more classical Twillight Hobby You can use them in the same time! will these renderers be good enough to create a real look of my product ?

It should be a 30-day trial of SU2017 Pro, not 4 months. After the trial ends, it will revert to SketchUp Make assuming you have downloaded and installed the correct version.

I do not completely follow what you are saying. When you say: "you must have 'Materials' folders for both yours and SU's" are you saying that I must name the folder on my PC "Materials" and then point SU to look at that folder for materials? I have tried changing the folder with my files to both "Materials" and "My_Materials". I have subfolders named uniquely and the same ("Stone" and "My_Stone"). In all cases nothing shows up inside SU. If I copy a folder of materials to AppData>Roaming>Sketchup>Sketchup 2017> Sketchup > MAterials then it will show up at the bottom of the list in the materials browser. As far as I can tell changing the folder locations in SU via windw > preferences > Files > materials as no effect. I'm sure I'm missing something which is kind of driving me nuts. I don't know why I am really even trying to get this to work anymore, certainly isn't seeming all that convenient. My goal is for sketchup to forget about what comes stock with the program and use the materials and subfolders of my choice. I suppose I will just go back to the way I have been doing it which is to change the structure in the OS files.

I have tried DPI-8 handheld 3D scanner, it is easy to use. http://mep.trimble.com/products/scanning/dpi-8-handheld-3d-scanner

@panixia said: @john2 said: @panixia said: the "Flowify" plugin could be very helpful for this kind of shapes too.. The easiest way to become Frank O Gehry. Thanks a lot for this!! My mind was feeling dizzy as experienced in the theatre while watchign the shape shifting architecture of Inception and Dr. Strange. it's a very useful (and robust) plugin.. you can model some simple flat shapes and then map them to curved surfaces.. here you can see an example of use.. a simple process to get a shape that would be not so easy and fast without flowify and a couple of oter plugins.. http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=397%26amp;t=66269 Thanks a lot again!

I'm pretty sure you are talking about PlaceMaker: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=66184

Having been through the process of setting up SketchUp on multiple computers, I have a process the seems to streamline it. The first things I do are open SU in the previous version and save the blank template file into a directory I can easily find. Then I make a screenshot of the entire SketchUp screen and save that image in the same directory. Since I use both Mac and Windows, I have a screen shot for each. Next, I install the SCF Extension Store so I can install the bundle from SCF. I also install my extensions from the EW. I've already got my custom styles, materials and local component collections in a directory called SketchUp Assets. I don't put them in the User/AppData or Use/Library/Application Support directories. I open the saved template file in the new version of SketchUp and immediately use File>Save as template... Next, I import as an image the screenshot I made of the old version to use as a guide for placing toolbars and creating the custom toolbars on the PC side. Then I make the toolbars and place the ones I want displayed. Finally, in Preferences, I point SketchUp to the appropriate folders in the SketchUp Assets directory. That Assets directory, the screenshot and the template file can all be copied to a memory stick or to a network drive.

It works! Many Thanks, François

Tried those settings and it did not have any affect on the problem. I am talking to Sketchfab as it seems the error might be on their side or that SketchUp 2017 is doing something different. The model shows up as empty on the Sketchfab side. If we get a resolution, I will post it here...