thank you. thats what i was looking for.

@unknownuser said: ...or changing the back side to the same color as the front side might make more sense in this case since you aren't showing edges. -brodie True, true.

If you divide up the ply's by planar hidden smoothed lines to smaller chunks the performance will increase. My understanding is that the core polygon engine has some inefficient algorithm for large ply's with many holes in them. cheers

Do you have crash when closing a project window ? Or loading another Skp file ? I have such crashes, it's minor for me, but since month I was sick about. I send a mail to Google SketchUp team, and they send me a procedure to try to fix it. I will try these days and tell you about.

If you have a decent 'black and white' image of this text then why not save it as a PNG with the background fully transparent [no anti-aliasing]. Import that PNG into your SKP as an Image. If you want it as a physical object [make it a reasonable size, you can always rescale things later] then use my ImageTrimmer tool [search the Plugins Index] which will cut out the forms automatically - end by choosing a simplify of ~2 so that the smooth curves get replicated and pixel-jaggedness is avoided. You then have a component with geometry faces and the original material applied to them. You can edit them using PushPull etc as desired........

Hello Evan, thanks for replying to my thread I'll look into your software

There is definitely some post-processing done in the original example. Reflections have been added and I suspect those long lines running through the sky are added afterward, too. I think a major difference between your image and the examples is their use of simple, transparent trees. You could edit yours to make them transparent which would help. I have made quite a few styles but wouldn't presume to copy an existing one even if it is commercially available one. If you really want that style, you should get it from Form Fonts.

Thank you very much TIG, i´ll try every option and see which one works and post results I tried the easiest thing first and it worked, i disabled the fast feedback and the problem disappeared. But i like my fast feedback so i turned it ON again and the problem didn´t came back, i just did that i have a new driver ready to install but i think that if this happens again i will just try the disable/enable fast feedback again

thanks a lot. it worked. You saved my day... How do u guys learn ruby for sketchup? What are the basic requirements (computer knowledge) to start ruby? I wish i could learn efficiently and quickly. Thanks again.

I really liked Aidan Chopra's "Sketchup for Dummies." I found it very helpful.

@driven said: I tried boolean helper [ruby] to upscale 1000x then jpp to 250 inches seems to work... you do have some stray geometry that might be throwing it off... or try thomthom's shell john Stray geometry??? Where? EDIT---------------------- I closed the 8 slots on the base unit and put a temp cover on it to form a solid. Using SI I found some extra lines and corrected them. Then scaled up 10X. This time SU crashed at about 75% along the JPP progress scale.

On Windows, the positions are saved into the Registry.. and the saving is BUGGED... ironically by the "Save/Restore Toolbars" feature the was added in v8. It seems each time you get a "scramble" and choose Restore, you get duplicate entries for all toolbars. If you turn off a plugin that has a toolbar, when the plugin is turned back on, Sketchup creates a new Registry entry rather than using the old one. My toolbar entries in the Registry are up to 566 !! .. Sketchup is taking way too long to parse all this junk at startup.

View > Hidden Geometry OFF. Double-click surface to select the surface and the edges BUT NOT the 'smoothed-edges'. Use Make Group to add it to a new group - it will be automatically be made a copy because the originals are needed by the surface. Edit the Group. View > Hidden Geometry ON. View > Component Edit > Hide Rest of Model You can now see what you are doing. To make the base I did two meshes and then combined them. Draw a line across to make two halves. Select it and Divide into say 10, immediately use Weld.rb to weld it into a 'curve' of 10 segments. This is the 'profile' Draw two short edges away from the apex of each end. Select the outline's edges from one of these to the 'profile' [~1/4], use Weld again to make it a 'curve' - this will be a Rail. Repeat this for the other three pieces of the outline. You now have a straight curve - the profile - and four 'rail' curves - we'll now process these two at a time. Use EEbyRails, pick the profile-curve then two 'rails' on the same side, finish by picking the 'profile' again [i.e. there's no 'melding-profile' for this type of surface!], answer the questions with 'No' unless the mesh faces 'up' - if it does 'reverse' the faces. You now have a mesh of ~half of the bottom face. Repeat to make the other half. Select the two groups and explode them. You now have the bottom-group, explode that and it will heal with the main [original] surface. Select All and group it, so Slicer has something to work on... Note: your surface is quite small so I recommend you first scale up the group x 8, make the slices at 1", then scale everything down by x 0.125... Sketchup has problems with making very small faces BUT they exist no problem when scaled smaller...

@mitcorb said: Hi, rock1: Look in Plugins Index, red button at top of this page, navigate to author "-BTM", look for link to Sculpt tool. This might help. awessssssome!! didn't know such an awesome freeform deformation tool existed

@mitcorb said: I note that you have posted in the VRay subforum. I do not have any experience in VRay. Perhaps a moderator would want to relocate this to the appropriate subforum? Thank you very much for the explanation! and the link too! Yeah I noticed I placed this in the wrong section..doh

I hoped you do not notice it (I only noticed when I was done). Actually, when you are with the simple, rectangular shape first, you can right click on the face > Texture > Position and the Flip it horizontally (left/right). This can be done separately on either side but be aware that some rendering applications will not be able to render these different maps (they generally render whatever is on the front face). The reason I ended up with this is that I imported the image as an image entity and exploded afterwards. In this case, SU creates a face with the image projected on it - and the mirror on the other side (it has the reasons we can go into later if you want).

Hi Chris, Have a look at Drop.rb here: http://www.smustard.com/script/Drop It will drop a series of groups/components to the next surface they reach while falling. The "drop point" is always the group/component origin so make sure it is somewhere you like them to touch ground.

thanks!

hello to all, as i had to work on this file, i've openned it on a 64bit pc and 'broke' it in small pieces - then i removed all building materials, join it all again, now its fine. later when preparing final renders i'll export to collada to reduce texture sizes, but right now i prefer everything in white... regards, diogo