thank you for sharing!

You need to do the following... first make a shape to be your light and apply a unique material to it...call it IES emitter or something useful next in the Maxwell Scene Manager using the materials tab assign an IES emitter material to this material you just created in SU. You should see different previews of the various IES lights that came with the Maxwell plugin. If you don't see any light try reversing the faces ... if this doesn't work try increasing the power or wattage of the IES light...however this is just to see if it is working Essentially Maxwell works just like a camera so for interiors lit by lights you need to increase your exposure which is done by changing the EV value in the Maxwell scene manager.. as you do this the FIRE render should update and allow you to tweak the settings until you get the light level you want

A lot of time has passed since I started this thread. As an update, I want to mention that the latest version of Jonathan's (aka "Marginal") SU2XP plugin for SketchUp now does an excellent job of animating SketchUp models to make rotations, movements (translations), smoke, lights, etc. It is doing everything I want it to do so far. Bill

Thanks guys, really appriceate the feedback your a big help. I plan on using SU a lot this year and really want to get the most out of the program. @ TIG... your a legend... I dont know where I'd be without section cut face... Well done dude!

@dave r said: Assuming you've applied the material image to the face and not to a component or group, you can adjust the position of the material as well as its orientation. Right click on the face and choose Texture>Position. You'll get some push pins that can be adjusted or you can click on the material and drag the image around to determine where the edges fall. You might have a look at this for some ideas. In the case of your texture image, the lighting isn't even so you'll still have the fade from light to dark repeating up the wall. Excellent, thanks for that. You guys never disappoint 'You never stop learning'

@unknownuser said: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention my family is in Kerrville. We were there for about 2 weeks this summer. That's only about an hour and a half away From me. With the worst drought in recorded history, the Hill Country isn't as pretty as it could be.

Good one Cotty. I like the "Newer!" part. "Well... At least it's newer."

@rich o brien said: Or Window > Instructor is always a cool way to learn about native tools For native tools, the shortcuts are listed on the reference card (togehter with all combinations, for paintbucket e.g. shift, ctrl, shift+ctrl, alt), this is helpful for learning them...

Excellent thanks for that. Couldn't believe it, it was already bookmarked in my browser

Thank you

@kyleboyd said: My machine has a NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 - as far as Hardware Acceleration, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to that (I would love to know more, just haven't taken the time to learn). I attached a screen shot of that as well, but I suspect it may not be useful. I was thinking of the Hardware Acceleration setting in SketchUp itself: [image: LsLG_Hardware.png] @kyleboyd said: Unfortunately I'm not able to upload the model to a public thread such as this one, I'm sure that would be the most helpful thing to do. You can send it to me directly if you're comfortable with that. Then we'd know if it's a model or system issue.

That projector Valerostudio linked to is just a light, a mirror and a lens. The original artwork needs to be printed on paper so it'll project whatever you printed.

Hi folks. See this SU file for ideas: Finding the center of exploded curve.skp

Unclear what B and C refer to: the points adjacent to A on the ground? Is the solid resting on a triangular face? Another view would help clarify its shape. Is one supposed to be able to carry out the indicated operations on the provided file? Perhaps add the result of the rotation.

Thanks everyone It's relief to know it means no harm and may even be useful! Thanks again Cal

Hi John, Thank you very much for looking into this issue. If I'm understanding you correctly, the DC re-sizing works for you on your Mac (yet still gives the Ruby Console error)? That's really interesting if that's the case. After many hours of re-drawing the same door frame over and over again, I decided to slowly replace parts from my test shelves to try to figure out at what point the DC stopped working correctly. As soon as I modified the Parent name from my working shelves, I noticed that the re-size stopped working, and then it hit me...I've been using the same name for every component and sub-component, even after re-drawing everything multiple times! As it turns out, the use of an ampersand (&) in the Parent name caused the re-size references to stop working correctly. It makes complete sense now that I think about it (I'm not a programmer, but I have had a little bit of exposure every now and then); I just wish I had known about this sooner...it could have saved me 6 hours or so This is probably really obvious to anyone who is well versed in DCs, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in the Sketchup documents. I'm guessing that there is a list of forbidden characters somewhere, but I've obviously missed it. I attached the completed door frame, so hopefully my experience can save someone else from the frustration that I just endured Kris dynamic components_door frame resize_test 003.skp

keyon Check your use of the scale tool. As long there is no geometry perpendicular to the scale direction like you would encounter scaling the rail of a frame where the stile width will then change ( one reason for Fredos scale tool stretch function). You can make a cutting plane then use the move tool but then the 2x will become a unique component unless you what all to change. Component scaling does not change the component definition so it is not an edit operation and the others in you model will not change . For a simple 2x the bevel will stay the same unless your scaling across axis? Pay attention to the handels your using.

Many thanks to you all for the help. I have browsed the links and downloaded the videos. These will definitely be good starting tutorials. Robel.