Thanks.

Hi Vigy, To make the holes, they are first contained within the surface then expanded to the edges, this makes the remaining surface act as one, and "self heals" as per attachment. Its probably best to build the mitre ends as 3 part component if you wish to use Dynamic Components At some point though your efforts may be best spent on the ruby code. Its fairly simple to move an edge to form the mitre using a script. I have considered your concept of engraving, which is to develop the hole further, attached is a reversed moulding to build a cutout in a panel. The biggest problem with DC's is that they soon become memory hungry and "clunky". Cheers for now still experimenting Philip PS after a weekend check the mitre box in wood working forum for update [image: Ik6x_Capture.JPG] making holes.skp insert2.skp

I'm glad that helped. You'll find it is helpful for other reasons than just orbiting. Drawing with the the default axis orientation and solid blue up will make shadows correct and make your standard views more useful. If your model has a front, place it so it runs along the red axis direction and those standard views will all click into place.

@dave r said: I thought the instructions coupled with the illustration were very clear. Hmmm.... It seems pretty straight forward to me to drag the selection box only around what you want to select. I never thought to tell someone that. I guess I'll be adding that to my training program. "drag the selection box only around what you want to select." Well technically that is what I did the first time. I was looking at the entire back side of the sphere and that's what I wanted to select. So I drew the selection box around that. I didn't realize till later that the example image was looking at the "side" of the sphere. Oh and this was the model I was doing. [image: spikebowlingball01.jpg]

You can send me small example. I'll try to get some time to look at it.

Hi, MM: Sketchup heretofore does not do lights, or caustics. It is not a rendering program. You could create a material/texture from a picture of a blazing light bulb, but it would not impart any effect on the surroundings. You mentioned Kerkythea and Light Up which are both good rendering programs. Look at this forum page: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=3220#p15472 Maybe one of those?

I managed to find my issue. When creating a surface from contours, I did not realise the resulting entity is a group. So I was actually applying the texture to the group, rather than the actual surface. When I went into the group and directly applied to the surface, it worked properly.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing it.

Oh, ok. I must have forgotten about having to use Ctrl when clicking.

If you have the Maxwell plugin, working with proxies is the way to go. Its also very simple. Nothing complicated, just place a component that is linked to a .mxs proxy. See the manual of the plugin. I have done much larger files with proxies, impossible to do any other way. I could render 50 trees (700 Mb each) without much problems sraight from Sketchup. In Sketechup the trees represent just a simple volume. The way we work now is to use Sketchup as a placement tool for Maxwell proxies. The SU files are very responsive and easy to work with. No matter how complicated. What you do is model in Sketchup parts of your model and export those parts to .mxs You can assemble those parts later on in SU. You can put textures on your model parts either in Sketchup or Maxwell Studio. But we never use many materials in one Sketchup masterfile since this slows down Sketchup a lot. After we done the parts and have set up the .mxs proxy we delete the materials in Sketchup since they are no longer needed for these parts. That is one of the great advantages. Very small SU files. I have done office interiors with flowers, tables, seats etc that could never have been done in a single SU file unless these files would have grown into +Gigabytes monsters. Have a look here, http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=52418 Proxies is how we work these days and how everybody will work in the future (with SU). Francois

I don't know but SketchUp 2013 shouldn't have done anything with your SketchUp 8. As I said before, SU 2013 is installed in an entirely different directory than SU8. As far as I know SU 2013 doesn't even look at the Google folder or its contents during install. Or did you use a custom install location when you installed SketchUp? Is SU 8 in a folder called Google?

Thanks make that fixed it for me regarding dof circle & arc sides etc. I really thought i was going mad or that sketchup now was different. I was even hunting for a guilty plugin. Let's hope an update patch will soon fix this.

@studio43 said: DiBac plugin looks promising. Unfortunately, website order form is not in English, so I will have to wait to purchase

Good to hear it's working!

Thanks to you all. Not a USB issue, moving models from one version of SU to Make was the issue and limited permission. All solved. THANKS !!!!!!!

I used to suffer BugSplats when I used SU5 on a pc years ago. Since switching to Mac 5 years ago never had a problem. However, I've had two bugsplats this week whilst working on simple floor plans. Very odd!

Thanks Dave! I'm converted - I'll invest time to learn SketchUp. Charlie