In the "real world" it is a matter of your understanding with whomever you are providing the designs to. I don't know that there is any generally accepted practice. I'm sure it depends on whether your client is adequately knowledgeable about SketchUp. It also depends on the form in which your user expects to receive the model. You may have to convert it to something else, such as stl, before you send it on. In that case is it your problem to decide how your objects were meant. Unless you annotate the model or provide separate documentation of your intent, someone using the model will have to provide their own interpretation. As noted, for some cases you can protect yourself by modeling at finer granularity (smaller Edges) than you know the user will require. Of course, this causes the model to have a very high Entity count. You are faced with a fundamental aspect of SketchUp's design: it might be termed WYSIAYG (what you see is all you've got). In some other applications, an object is defined in an abstract mathematical form (e.g. center location, normal vector, and radius for a 3D circle) and is converted to line segments when and as needed. For instance, when rendered to the display, a circle needs to be converted to a raster image with pixels appropriate to the resolution of the display. On a different display, a different raster representation will be generated. In SketchUp, there is no such higher-order abstract model. The Edges and Faces representing a shape are all there is. OK - picky point - a sequence of Edges can be joined together to form a polyline or polygon, but there is still no abstract model of the polygon as such. So, for a circle, a user needs to know how to find the center and measure from there to a vertex to discover the original as-drawn radius. If it really matters and they don't have the SketchUp expertise to do this, you will have to do it for them and annotate the model. This whole thing is a fundamental aspect of SketchUp's internal design, and part of how it obtains its much-treasured interactive user interface. Changing to the abstract-model-rendered-when-needed paradigm would be an end-to-end redesign of all the basic mechanisms of SketchUp. Steve

Look at http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=352084#p352084 which has something that works on PCs before v2014... But it'd need recasting for v2014...

I wouldn't add polygons in SU if the model is going to ultimately end up in 3ds. Add your extra polys in 3ds with its excellent poly modelling tools just so that you know what you are getting as your end result and with much easier and cleaner results. But you can do it in SU using the Artisan plugin and its subdivide or knife tool depending on how much control you want over where the new polys go and how they are organized. Artisans knife tool is one of the least recognized of the best SU plugin tools. Just be sure to use it in orthographic views and probably with your perspective turned off for the most predictable results.

Well we actual found that if you make the outline by material it dose what we wanted it to in that you can make a line a different color and in turn make your text a solid color at any zoomed out or close up level. Thanks for the help.

Douglas, I don't have an answer for you just letting you know your not alone. I've had the same issue with Curviloft & SU8. In my case I think it was operator error in selecting the various paths. To get my toolbars back I have to quit SU and start over. In watching the video tutorials again seems there is some logic in the order you select stuff. No problems after I started to pay better attention to what I'm doing. chuck.

Thanks Sketch3d, What if I copy my file to my private area directly?

Jaguarrh, As an alternative to Procad who seem to just provide a basics course, sketchuptraining.com.au do a couple of more advanced courses; one that covers Visualisation/rendering with Sketchup and a course for producing technical drawings with Sketchup and Layout. The courses focus mostly on architecture and building design but they do cover terrain modelling as well as the use of advanced plugins to extend Sketchup's capabilities. They seem to specialise only in Sketchup unlike the others you mention and if you look at the gallery on the website or follow the link to the Facebook page, they have some very impressive examples. It says that courses are held once or twice a year in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Worth a look... Grice

@jedicharles said: That did the trick, thanks for the help! cool

You can export shortcuts from one install to another and you can share a template which is just a blank SketchUp file but since the toolbar positions are registry entries, I think they'd have to be written by the program. It would be nice to have a way to do it but I'm certainly not the guy to make it happen.

You are all welcome Just a small payback and overdue too. dtr

Mac1: What I meant to imply by the term "efficiently" was the relative amount of manual effort required to accomplished a task within SketchUp. Manual effort can loosely be define as any task which requires a user to work on low-level geometry (faces, edges, vertices) when it is reasonable to expect SketchUp to take care of the task for you. This is important to me for several reasons. First, I have found that it is really easy ruin a SketchUp model by messing with geometry. My preference is to deal with atomic objects and to let SketchUp deal with geometry. Hopefully, that gives a clearer definition of what I meant by the "efficiently". Thanks for your comments.

Where did you attach the screen grab? Is it possible the section cut is inside a group or component that doesn't contain the uncut components?

Another solution Extrude Edges by Tig Weld = Recurve by Diggsey [image: t03M_extrude.jpg]

Somewhere along the line you ought to be able to get someone to export so the dimensions are correct when imported into SketchUp. If not, can you get one of the other file types that SketchUp will import? Then you should be able to click on Options and set the correct units. It wouldn't hurt to see if you can get cleaner models to import, too.

Found it. In case anyone else wonders it's accessed via the Styles Panel: Edit->Modeling (furthest tab to the right).

ThruPaint sounds perfect, going to try it now, thanks for the pbacot. I make some of my models in GtkRadiant (used for q3, similar to hammer for hl1/source), and export as OBJ.

@unknownuser said: I love Apple and own all the mobile devices, an iMac and several Mac Pros for my home, but in the pipeline for my work…there isn’t one Mac. It can’t run Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Fume FX, or CUDA so I’m still waiting. I hope that in the future Apple will remedy this situation so that a Mac Pro can be found everywhere without any limitations. —- AKIKO ASHLEY That pretty much sums it up for me. It would be a no-brainer if the thing had even moderately good Nvidia cards in it. It's so frustrating that Apple (and almost everyone else) views 'Pro' consumers as video editors. I'm a pro; I make a living sitting in front of many many pixels creating stuff, stuff that actually gets built into real things. The conclusion my better half (who's machine would shame anyone* on here) and I came to is that I buy another Retina Macbook Pro and build a monster powerful PC to use as a render slave. *I dare you step up to her hardware