I have a firepro v5800 that I just put yesterday in my computer, so far I have no problems with it, (only tested in sketchup, thea and twinmotion) but I don't see any difference between this one and my old 9800 gt gainward, so I don't know if it's worth getting a good graphic card these days, maybe for programs asking more of the graphic card like 3dsmax (maybe?)

@tig said: First off the car does seem a little 'short' - you need to scale it up, or get a better model. Next when you place a component like a car into the model you can use Move and pick a point on the car [e.g. bottom of a tyre] and then snap to something on the surface you want to place it onto - like the 'driveway' - and it then on that 'plane'. Subsequent moves can be constrained in any of the three axes using shift or arrow keys. When you've placed the car you have done it in an obscure way, positioning it so that it looks right in that view but of course when you change camera positions it's wrong - in fact 'flying'! You are not taking cardboard cutouts of things an making a montage, rather these should be proper sized objects that are placed relative to each other in the right relationships. BUT let's skip the car for a moment... So you understand this try this experiment... Hold you hand out at arm's-length in front of you, palm away from your face. Move it around until it obscures about half of something in the room - say the TV. Now slowly move your hand nearer to your face so it obscures more and more of the TV. When you hand is near your face you can't see the TV or other parts of the room near it. That's what you did with the exceptionally small car, by moving it nearer the camera you hid more drive-way until it looked the right size BUT it wasn't changing its size just its location. You accept that your hand's location affects how much it obscures from your view AND it doesn't physically change the actual size of your hand! I suggest that you edit the car component [double-click to go into edit mode] and use the Tapemeasure tool and pick the centres of two of the wheels' hub-caps on the same side and type in what the wheelbase is likely to be - for that kind of car perhaps '2.5m' ? This will rescale the car to be the right size. Exit the edit-mode. axis when you only wanted to move it 100mm is easily fixed by typing 100mm after the ~1m move but before you pick any other tool... When rotating an object the rotate-gizmo appears locked to the plane its on [or lock it by holding shift] and you pick two points to do the rotation by eye - the VCB shows the actual value OR as with Move you can type an actual angle so if you want the car rotating 5 degrees type in 5... Hi Tig, thank you very much for all your time in helping me- I'm geting there. thank you Hans

This guy Alex Jenyon use Sketchup with any restriction One tut here at SCF (scroll the page)

@gaieus said: I use Jim's Custom Toolbar plugin and it has some extra buttons otherwise not available in the native SU toolbars. Some of these allow quick style changes and these style settings can be very useful when trying to fix a screwed up model (or trying to find endpoints to snap to). Normally I do not use any fancy styles (and keeping it simple also helps with performance when the model is getting complex) Thank you for your interest. I have used Daves method and was absolutely delighted when I ended up with a nice clean edge drawing. thank you Hans

Thanks Thom - batch file worked like a dream - startup time greatly reduced.

you can also try OpenSpace3D (free) Just export your SKP file and have happy walk

The 2dFillet tool in my 2dTool set works in 3d too, if also has a 'chamfer' toggle, if you fillet two lines with 0 radius it acts like trim/extend tool. There's also 2dAdjust that lets you pick several edges/arcs as targets and then several more to 'adjust' to the targets - either extending or trimming the line/arc as appropriate... There are also several other 2dTools in the fill set that mimic CAD like 2dHatching, 2dLineStyle and 2dText... My Mirror tool allows you to mirror a selection about any point/line/plane - it has some advantages over the Scale tool with '-1', or the flip-on-axis methods from the context-menu, as you can chose to make a copy as you Mirror - just like in ACAD. To tidy messy edges/gaps etc 'OpenClosedLines' is available at Smustard.com [$?] An alternative is to look at Thomthom's 'Cleanup' and 'Edge' tools ['free' - see Plugins Index link above...] which do various things that might also help... His 'guide_tools' also let you add cpoints in various ways. There are tools to add cpoints by picking points and of course there is a midpoint snap inference for any edge, so you can place a cpoint at the midpoint of any edge [if there's no connecting edge then draw a temporary line between the two points, snap to its center for the cpoint location and then erase the unwanted line]; however, if you must have this as a separate tool then http://www.smustard.com/script/Midpoint is a free download that adds this to the context-menu... You change the current axes using the Axes tool - this is equivalent to making another 'UCS' - you right-click context-menu over an axis to reset back to the 'world-axes'. Sketchup isn't CAD so you need to appreciate the differences - the main one is that Layers do not separate geometry - they simply show/hide what's on them; so draw all connected geometry on Layer0, make a group or component and give that a different layer so that if is seen/unseen. Other non-connected geometry is made in a similar way so you get no unpleasant surprises - separating say a face and its edges by layer is very risky as erasing a visible edge can also erase an invisible that that needed the edge - because you can't see geometry on another layer doesn't mean it's not reliant on some geometry that you can see and will can be affected by your editing/erasing of that - unless you use group/component to somehow separate this geometry and you then use layers to control visibility of those... You can also lock/unlock groups/instances so you can't accidentally edit, move or erase them - another usefu'

Note that the GE terrain is just a more or less accurate approximation of the real terrain (in fact, any digital data about terrain is just an approximation since the accuracy depends on the denseness of the data collected). Now just like with the variation of imagery quality al around the world, the terrain quality is not the same everywhere either. Smaller or sometimes even bigger terrain differences (especially when these are only at a very local level) often "averaged" and you can only tell that the overall accuracy is more or less okay throughout a couple of miles (and not the details within this distance). Certainly falling into an "averaged" area where the slope goes exactly the other direction, is a pretty much unfortunate thing. Is the difference very big? Would it prevent you from modelling something completely?

hmm. i don't think you're going to be able to accomplish this with dynamic components.. i'm not quite sure how the jumpers are supposed to look when filling the awkward shaped roofs but i assume they will be cut on angles.(?) basically, if you can't use standard sketchup's Scale,Move, & Rotate ( , , ) tools to modify the components then you can't do it with DCs.. (there are workarounds such as shown in this stair building dc of mine.. i made the video to show the suTeam some requests of mine but you'll probably be able to see the limitations you're up against here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QYs1lcrAck ) so, try taking one of your jumper components and using only the tools i mentioned earlier, conform it to your desired shape.. is it possible? also, with DCs, you can't just click on one of the odd surfaces then have the components populate the area automagically.. you'd have to enter all the parameters manually via a component dialog which would be easy enough to do with the rectangle shape but once you get into the varying angles/cuts/etc, you're going to hit a dead end.. this would be more suited to ruby and there are people on these forums that could (probably) make a plugin for you but, it's so specialized of a plugin that i don't think they're just going to make it and publish here as nobody but you needs it.. it seems like a situation for contracting one of the writers to build the plugin specifically suited to your needs.. if this is for your business, i'd say it's a route you may want to explore as it's going to save you tons of time over drawing these things manually per each roof.. i don't know how much they'd charge to do something like this but if it were me, i'd be expecting something in the $100-$500 range(?)

@qverburg said: Hmm the thickning trick seems to work. Alltough it is quite a work around and hard to fix. In my script the inner lattice can be smaller than the outer ring. Thats why I create them seperately. I attached a SKP where you can see the procedure and another "error" I get in certain union situations. Would be great if you can shine a light on it Classic, forgot the attachment! union error 2

First release is out there: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=39442

Okay, if that is the general with your models, you could even choose a template with centimetres (x10) or metres (x1,000) and keep modelling "as if" you were doing it in millimetres (i.e. no need to recalculate the values every time you draw something). At the end, when you are finished, you can scale the whole thing down and in the model info dialog, set the units to mm (it will "stick" for this particular model file only). If you do any texturing with image materials, only do it with the correctly scaled down model (images get scaled up/down when inside groups/components).

@tig said: So theoretically you could [re]set the @@playcmd.small_icon() etc dynamically in response to a user clicking the button and/or the tool's @state changing etc... There's no problem with changing the path to the image (no exception is raised,) it's just that the UI::Toolbar instance ignores the change. We've tried closing and opening the toolbar, but no effect. This is a change that needs to be implemented in the API using the relevant system calls on each platform. (I know how to do it on Windows making a Win32 call, but not on Mac.) So, this is a true wish... add my vote.

@jimstockman said: Thanks Jeff, I've already been down that road which is fine for a single window or door, but I require more complexity. I require walls with varying numbers of windows and doors at specific x/z coordinates on the face of the wall. I can segment the wall to whatever level of complexity I need using your solution, but it's cumbersome and really not very flexible. the DC i posted could be modified to incorporate more windows and doors using the Copies behavior.. i'm not sure how much you experimented with the dc but it does allow for specific x/z coordinates of the window.. as you say, it's cumbersome and i didn't feel the need to spend a super long time building the DC with more options.. @unknownuser said: I can also build a wall segment with a single hole and add connected wall segments to that, each with its own positioning of the hole until I complete the entire length of the wall. I think that absent some level of scripting, I'm not going to be able to get into the inside geometry of the wall to manipulate the position of the hole. right.. what you want to do is not possible with dynamic components unless you follow the route similar to the example.. well, there are a couple of other ways to do it but maybe not as elegant as you'd hope for.. you'd basically have separate solid components moving around inside the main DC.. for instance -- the wall is just a single solid 3D rectangle, then you have blocks which will represent the doors/windows cutout and those are positioned/sized according to user input.. after everything is in place, you'd use the solid tools to intersect the objects and create your holes.. at the same time as the hole cutting objects being sized/posititioned, you'd have your doors being sized/positioned as well so after the solid tools operation is finished, the doors will be sitting inside the wall with proper cutouts.. i have another workaround that i do but it's even more confusing than that ^ so i won't get into it at this time. other than doing some of the steps outlined above, ruby is where you need to be looking at as it's going to be much more flexible though i suspect it will also be much more cumbersome for you to arrive at a solution. especially if you don't know any ruby good luck

Hi Keith, Is the scroll wheel working in other apps? Did you install a driver lately?

O.K. I was thinking about messing with the registry but decided I should ask here instead. I guess I'll just live with it. Plus, there's really no reason for me not to switch to v.8, is there?

Excellent work. Keep plugging away. Dave

@gulcanocali said: Hi Alessandro, @surfingalien said: artisan (and eventually tgi3d) is something I'm considerING (ouch!) to buy... Just FYI, cross section tool mentioned here is available unrestricted in the free Training Edition of Tgi3D SU Amorph. Regards, thank you for the info, I saw it was available in the free training edition (as pilou pointed out) it was a more general thought about some very well done tools I'm doing all the "organic" modeling outside SU at the moment (Silo3D and Cheetah3D mainly) cheers, Alessandro

I cannot see much understandable text in metric version. So cannot try to edit it. It shows sanskrit language perhaps.