@pcmoor said: can you upload an example, I will try....please give advice on how to do this on this forum

Yeah you won't get an answer on this from anyone directly involved with Sketchup, whatever they say could be viewed as official policy. My reading of it is if you aren't using if for commercial gain then the free version is ok. ie: you draw up some plans to work out your space, unless you sell those plans to someone there is no commercial gain. But there are many and varied legal loopholes and strangleholds tied up with all of that. Sketchup does grant non profit licenses, so if you feel you need to you can contact them directly.

Try also this free one : a Sketchup on stéroïds! The best CAd ergonomy existing: Direct modeling inpired by SU of course! DesignSpark (it has a SKetchup export skp! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_kIb-O4mcI

I opted for the 15" MacBook Pro and am very happy thus far. A complex remodel project that I'm doing construction docs for is moving along without stressing the new machine like it did my old one (I have them sitting side by side...) Not the ideal workhorse for some folks - but as I'm mobile its a good choice for me. I've been using the activity monitor - I can see CPU load but not GPU load, but can check that the discreet card is in play whenever I have this file open. Will do some comparisons on a series of shadow studies I did earlier in the year to see how it handles that.

3DSimEd imports and exports SU models into a variety of racing simulators. http://www.sim-garage.co.uk/

I draw screw threads this way. [image: 14023693284_2c9ce20e22_z.jpg]

@4hotshoez said: Nevertheless, I was having server update issues too so... So, what? Is there a question, still?

@budlat31 said: Newbie here. But I've spent most of the weekend trying to use Match Photo. Tracing lines of a house. Almost NEVER will the tracing of a surface create a "face". I've read on the forums and tutorials. Issue is often that the points traced are not co-planar. I get that, but how do I MAKE them co-planar and thus solve the problem? I haven't, so far, found instruction on how to deal with this. I found out how to confirm that the points are not co-planar - so now that I know that, what do I do about it? Any help much appreciated. I love these forums. New situation: when drawing a new edges from one corner of an existing face into open space: click on the corner to start the edge hover the tool cursor over the face till 'On Face' pops up press and hold down [Shift] to constrain drawing coplanar and click on target to end drawing the edge. (this procedure may vary slightly, depending on your preferences in drawing, also see menu Window > Preferences > Drawing > Click Style 1/2/3) Correcting existing situation: right click on the desired face (more or less to set the plane to use) and select 'Align Axes' in the context menu (blue becomes the normal/perpendicular axis) with nothing selected but the 'Move' tool, grab an "out of plane" endpoint, move it and hit [Arrow Up] to constrain to blue, and position the tool cursor on the face and click. The moved endpoint moves up to the current red/green plane, the plane of the face. Note that if the endpoint was just slightly out of plane, you may need to move it further from plane, and then in a second step move it into plane.

@daviddoria said: Or is there a better/easier way to erase the unwanted parts? [screenr:1llspzo0]H7fN[/screenr:1llspzo0]

Hi Stuart, will you be printing Dudley all in one piece, or do you want him to move? If you want him articulated, printing the pieces separately and snapping them together like a ball jointed robot afterwards is recommended, because the clearances needed to print a moving assembly in one go will leave the joints loose and sloppy. You will want all the parts in one group of you mean to print him in one piece. I wouldn't explode everything though, or you'll end up with a non-solid mess. It's usually better to make the individual groups solid and then use the Outer Shell tool to combine them into one solid group. If I were you, I'd make this model one piece first to get a feel for the process, and then if you want to mess around with clearances for joints and assembling pieces, make another model. Just an idea.

@cotty said: You can use the normal inferencing system to position a section cut (middle point, guide lines, ...) and you can fix a direction with the shift button ... Do you have an example image or model where it doesn't snap? Thanks. "Shift button"is the answer. I'd never tried using it while it moving the sec plane.

Never used 7 myself...

Thank you all. I am still discovering this marvelous sotfware...

@driven said: the whole point of any maintenance update is to deal quickly with reported splats... each release has an overview of the changes, do they reflect a possible correction of your issues? Well I just updated so we'll see. Many of mine were outliner-related: often when trying to change nesting order directly in the outliner. Didn't see anything in a quick scan of the release notes re the outliner, so don't know if this release will prove to be more stable in my case. (Although I have gone back to cutting and pasting in place in the model instead of shuffling groups/components in the outliner. Slower by far, but I got fed up with the splats. Kind of defeats the value of the outliner if you can't trust it for the purpose.) @driven said: After a considerable amount of bug chasing on mac's, I find recurring issues being related to 'plugin observers' and 'Auto Save', so I avoid both whenever possible... To do this I disable many plugins until I actually want to use them, including the SU ones, and any 'renderers'... I normally try to keep the number of enabled plugins in any given session to a minimum, but I realized that I had installed several new ones of late and left them all enabled, so a good reminder to pare it back down. As for the autosave, that's a tough one... and a bit ironic that the feature meant to ameliorate the results of a crash can be responsible for those very splats. I've tried to get in the habit of manual saves, but the more engrossed I am in modelling the less likely I am to remember. I would have lost an awful lot of work this last week if it weren't for the autosave file whittling it down to 5 or 10 minutes of lost work per crash. Thanks for your thoughts and 'best practices'. Doug

Thanks for the suggestion Jim but screenspace wasn't the problem. It was a windows tablet PC setting (right/left handed) that was causing it.

@rich o brien said: Windows XP. The greatest OS ever. Yeah, I figured that's what you meant, just couldn't understand why you thought it would still be a popular download. Yes, it was a great OS, I still have it on two of my machines (just because of the software I can't run on Win7), but since the security updates stopped it's become very risky to go online with. I was very reluctant to move on to Win7 but so glad I did. It has (IMHO) replaced XP as the greatest OS to date.

@rads2012 said: ...I did find editing the colours would not allow me to rename them - the only way I could achieve this was to duplicate the colour and give it a new name and then delete the old colour from the list. what's the renaming convention you are hoping to apply? there may be other ways to do it... john

John, I really appriciate you taking the time to help me out. I'll take your advice to create a material folder inside the "old color" folder in user/library path. thanks, chuck. P.S. - Rich, Thanks again for your input also. you helped me learn some more about checking under the hood and that's always a good thing!

You need to make a thea.lib file This then installs all the needed items so the Thea Browser in SU loads the billboards. The structure is like this... /PixeroLibrary description.txt info.txt | |_Models | |_Trees tree-01.mod.thea tree-01.mod.skp ...whereby you've a folder containing... 2 .txt files folder named for the library type (Models for models, Materials for maters....etc) within that folder a Named folder for branding etc... within that the model category/type within that the .mod.thea and .mod.skp file where the .skp is the face me billboards