big thanks

It will run noticeably slower that way, so I suggest you also check drivers etc - updating etc might mean it can work faster again...

I'm not sure what other aspects of sketchup may be lost?...But saving as sketchup version 6 or below removes dynamic attributes, retaining the component and sub components.

For who will need such a texture in the future and no better one will be available, I ended up making one. Is not very good, but is the best I could do. Here it is: [image: mCSt_Texturapiatra_C.jpg]

Perfect! Thank you guys again for the help.

' **Weld**' has nothing to do with ' Group'. In Sketchup there are Edges [aka 'lines'] - sometimes these are made 'bound' into 'Curves' - typically 'Arcs', or a fully looped 'Arc' which is then called a 'Circle'. However, any collection of Edges bound end-to-end can become a 'Curve'. A Curve is identified by the way it extrudes with PushPull into a form with 'smoothed' arises. There are some specific scripts to make special 'Curves' like Beziers... A long time ago Rick Wilson made a tool that takes a collection of such Edges and makes a Curve out of them [if it can]. It is called **weld.rb**. It is installed as a script that you put into the Plugins folder. On restart you get the tool 'Weld' that will make preselected Edges into a Curve... Many tools require Curves to be selected for them to work - if these are not 'out-of-the-box' Arcs then you need to ' weld' them - e.g. Chris Fullmer's 'ShapeBender' or many of my 'EEby...' tools... Oh, yeah... and weld.rb is freely available from http://www.Smustard.com [use Find > weld] ... An indispensable tool for any serious Sketchupper...

Maybe treat it as a tablecloth, to drape, so to speak, and model it upside down. Mindful that the dangling portion will need to be cinched up, or gathered. Now, I am thinking that you may approach this like modeling a teardrop. That suggests that you could start with a basic Sketchup UV sphere or a Geodesic sphere as one element, extend it, or stretch it, or scale it upward, form a 2d profile resembling gathered fabric, progressively/ sequentially pushpull and scale for a "few" reps, then tie a rope around it when you get tired. That's probably what I would try, without getting into plugins.

You can set the image resolution to recover image quality. Image warping is another matter. If you can not tolerate image warping you need to use unwrapping as the texture mapping method. Before you establish a trust in create texture tool I would suggest trying it with simple geometries (fewer faces looking more or less the same direction) first. Unwrap method may fail for (not too much) complicated geometries. Spherical projection needs to find a projection focus from which all the selection is seen from the same side. Let me try to give some examples. Here is a cylinder textured with standard textures and methods ( cylinder works with regular texture method in SU. [image: sLWp_cylbefore.jpg] In this case I selected the whole cylinder side and called create texture with png (we have a transparent section) as the image format and unwrap as the mapping method. [image: AaZk_cylafter.png] Observe that now we can erase the planar edges. The newly generated texture is like this. [image: GjzT_cyltexture.png] if we select spherical projection as the mapping method the created texture image is like this. [image: VwZB_sphericalmapped.png] To be able to create a nice mapping I had to triangulate and upsample the cylinder. The solid color (red) section contains arrows and edges drawn in it, these are sometimes useful, and easy to erase, in an image editor. Similarly for the following house (ish thing) [image: BDnW_housebefore.png] for which the created texture is [image: tuhB_housetexture.png] In SU texturing ngones may be troublesome, I sometimes triangulate the faces just to be able to get a good uv map. The attached skp file has the examples. texturexxx.skp

I have used the "Save As" command many times in the past, without problems. I have made about 15 incremental copies of File-1, in order to make design changes to the model; that way I can fall back to the saved copy, if needed. The only difference with File-2, is that I "moved" the groups back to layer0. I did this to purge and clean up the model before starting the rendering process. I have not started the purge and file cleaning process, however, I did explode the whole model once it was on layer0. I have a problem with posting the 3d design model file; because the model is a house design that will be for sale. Intellectural property (copyright)thing. If there is a way of posting my designs on the forum without losing my rights to the design; I would love to share then with the members. TIA, Bob

I already replied to you here - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=358742#p358742 There's no need to double-post

indeed! when they disabled this in the "upgrade" from SU7 free to SU8 free, I was a mite disappointed Was very relieved to find this ruby.

Thanks for the advice decided to stick with many components and groups as sometimes will also use max to model and alter parts of building. Found that using a script to clear missing bitmaps and unused materials helps with the multi subobject materials problem. May in future try using colour by layer in Sketchup and doing my texturing in max.

if anyone is interested I found another method. This will only work if you have 3dsmax Basically you must bake the texture in 3dsmax but obviously don't have any lighting or shadows checked when you do so This will generate a texture file. Export the 3d model to .dae then open deep exploration and re apply the texture to the model, you wont need to re size just that when you export for some reason it doesn't carry the texture with it. Then export to sketchup and you then are free to delete whatever mesh you have in the middle without ruining your texture. The downside to this is when the texture is baked it is severely degraded, im still looking for ways to fix it. [image: Sydney-1.jpg]

Did he tell you how to attach them using SU?

TIG is absolutely right. it's a fun puzzle to solve. I might add, you've given yourself some basic parameters, but the real trick is to see figure how you can get all of your needs in as little square footage (meterage?)as possible. Most people tend to way overbuild because they think they need a lot of space to do relatively few things. Try and figure out how do make spaces do double or triple duty. Dont think of a room as only having one function. (case in point. .. dining rooms!) Have fun and Good luck. ' Darn. . .I would've really likee to see the cartoon character thing in there.

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=359994#p359994 SolidSolver ?

Also look for my TextureTools which allow you to Rotate/Scale/Position any texture on a selected face either by typing in an amount OR by using the arrow keys... Search the Plugins Index...