Podium has its own Forum - you might get a better/quicker response if you posted there ?

These are fairly good: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=21216 If you're looking to spend money, I recommend these: http://www.cadplants.com/index.php

That's fantastic, thanks so much.

@oganocali said: Actually you can get it almost right in all views if you do view edges back edges profiles set the transparency of the material around 70 % set the profile width from styles to 1 With your technique and the face style "Hidden Line" the illustration is getting better (the vertical hole lines are not dashed...) [image: G4n7_hole3.jpg]

Thankyou Anssi! - I didn't think anyone would understand my confusing question. Kind regards, Steph

I don't think so. Geolocation is geolocation. I have no idea why this should not work...

@Jean Lemire: very instructive! I function as a tester for Tgi3D so I find all sorts of strange Sketchup bugs. A few months ago I came across a SketchUp feature which could be considered a bug. Imagine you are performing a move rotate or scale operation inside a component instance, Sketchup inference engine allows you to snap on a feature in another instance of the same component (which potentially depends on the edit you are performing). You can have Sketchup solve equations for you (or draw a dodecohedron directly for that matter). drawing_a_dodecohedron.skp

@ben_in_ca said: I'm also looking to convert a SketchUp file to a solid. Any suggestions? ViaCAD Pro plus PowerPack Pro [image: stacks_image_464.png] Converting SketchUp Files into useable Solids

This problem has been driving me nuts for years, in my largest models it was impossible to right click and delete materials from the SU Material Editor. A real pain when SU automatically creates solid colour materials for imported dwgs. Digitalmarley's trick above works! I had to change my Windows 7 theme to Classic (Basic didn't work), and SU stills hangs for about 20 seconds (for each material!), but finally the right click context menu comes up and I can choose delete. Thank you Digitalmarley! Trimble really need to sort out how SU handles materials, it's a terrible bottleneck. /Jackson

I would reduce the glossiness(es) of the reflective layer, and add a bumpmap to the material, (as I see from your case you can use the diffuse image as your bump map). good luck

Jean - thankyou that's a nice way to go about it. Zapwizard - that's a good suggestion using TIG's drape control points plug in - I'll experiment a bit with this. I had a very quick look at Artisan, but need to research it a bit more... but from what I can see, it is possible to manually add or simply detail in the mesh. It would be good however if there was a tool that could analyse the vertical complexity in the xyz data so that points that were similar to their neighbours would be tagged as redundant, so that an optimal irregular mesh could developed. Does such a plug in exist? Does Artisan do this? Thanks for your replies so far Mick

As it turns out if you check the contents of the two ' CD_ICONS' folders within the two tools' zipped archives there is no 'overlap' of their files... so both tools should install and work 'as expected'... BUT now for the bad news... Unfortunately you have chosen two 'packaged' sets that both have warnings attached to them... these are about files found within their archives that should never [ever] be installed into the Plugins folder [e.g. sketchup.rb! which comes in Tools supplied with Sketchup and can cause issues if an old copy loads form Plugins first - there are other similar files ]... IF you still want to try these two tools then p_l_e_a_s_e make sure that you carefully read the notes/comments about these 'rogue-scripts' that are wrongly packaged with these [somewhat outdated] toolsets and do NOT install those...

Great advice with the hidden line. Thanks.

And maybe take attention to the deformations of the internal / external forms of the elements for a perfect jonction!

In SU there is no curves ! Only edges! So each surface must be first closed by triangles! There is not inside the plug an option for erase coplanar edges ? (if I good remember)

That video should almost be compulsory for SketchUp users. This sort of thing comes up all the time.