It's not a try by me, it was on the site Home page of LightUp

yeah rich, I noticed it slowed down immediately. my computer is an old old man. StilTeg, I think you might have something there. I didn't realize I could change all that stuff in the file info thingie. This guy is pretty small. I'll play with it a bit and see if I can break it further.

This freeware http://www.linxexplorer.com/colorpicker.html lets you pick colors off any screen pixel...

Thanks Jeff!

I like this tutorial by Earthmover... I guess you could tell by my posts there. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=14565&p=110238&hilit=curved+wing+wall#p110238

Easier, yes. But, as you know, it isn't difficult at all to reposition the texture to avoid seams. In Pete's piece there are a lot of large surfaces that, if they were made in solid wood, would be glued up of several narrower pieces. It wouldn't look right to have the same cathedral grain repeated across the width. Even with sawn veneer it wouldn't be the same going across the width. My original question was asked because I see seamless wood material and the high realism that seems to be a goal in renderings for many folks as counter to each other.

Try this http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=199643#p199643

thanks, you saved me

Brodie, See this: http://www.smustard.com/script/SceneExporterPro An invaluable tool - I'd be lost without it. Pro version well worth the $10 - HIGHLY recommended. ........ There is also a free version. ........ I've found: For everyday images (eg for use in MS Word / other applications or for A3/ A4 printouts) you can export out as jpg's. For large (eg A0 / A1 size) high quality images, export out as png's (eg 6000+ px wide/tall ) - they come out really well - very sharp / crisp. ......... Hope this helps Regards Howard L'

How about just arranging multiple copies of this in a complete circle?

Ok, thank you for the info!

@whiskeytangofoxtrot said: @gulcanocali said: Hmm.. That is weird... Could it be a scale issue? Did you scale the model properly, i.e. assign a distance between any two points, before exporting to SketchUp? SketchUp does not behave well when objects are very small. I thought it was, because the orbit tool was behaving the way it does when you are zoomed in really tight to the origin. I went back and scaled the model in the calibration program, and brought it back in. It didn't seem to solve the problem. One thing I did notice...the orbit problem only happens after I re-align the axes. I almost want to say it's still orbiting around the original origin point. I don't know, I'll have to play around with it further. OK, I am at a loss about the orbit problem you are experiencing at this point. We will continue to look further. It would really help if you could upload your model for us to take a look. @whiskeytangofoxtrot said: @unknownuser said: The quality of calibration is important as well, I am not sure if it would cause this problem specifically, but things sometimes do behave strangely if you open a badly calibrated model in SketchUp. Did you check the "point errors" tab in the Tgi3D SU PhotoScan Calibration Tool before exporting the model? Try to make sure that all the point errors are less than 1-2 pixels. Wow, 1-2 pixels? I was off by several, but I thought that was still good...before I got my camera issue straightened out, it was like hundreds to thousands Is that still realistic for big wide shots of buildings? The better the calibration the better the model matching the photos of course. But you can run the calibration with "Create calibration uncertainty information" option. After that you can check the distance between any two points and look at the uncertainty range provided. If the uncertainty range is acceptable for your application, you can use that calibration.

Look forward to seeing it. Love to hear any tips you have on the photoshop trics as well. -brodie

Well, as I do not use Maxwell, I cannot really tell what's going on. The above example is mainly for native SketchUp as SU does not render image transparency when it comes to shadows. Maybe Maxwell cannot render alpha transparency either and would need clipmaps when rendering. But in any case, if renderers can use image transparency for clipping, the above solution only works if they can either render double sided materials (or what) like in V-ray or they can ad shadow to a completely transparent material (like Thea).

joscha We are good but your cryptic clues are not clear. Can you attach images [or SKPs] of what you get and what you want ? It might be that you actually need to do some work making this form and that plugins will only help you a certain distance along the road. With a little more detail I sure we can advise you how to do this...

Thanks for pointing this out. This appears to be a feature that has crept up on us. All versions up to and including V7 had a two part attribute...you could 'Locate' a model anywhere you liked (all FF stuff was located to San Luis Obispo CA) If you export a kmz from any of these, that model will indeed be located in someone's driveway near an intersection in downtown SLO. However importing such a model into SU did not (and does not) result in the behaviour you noted. However there is also a georeferencing check box (up to V7); if this is also checked then you get the behaviour you noted. This appears to be the case in the model mentioned. We'll make sure this doesn't occur again and try to track down any errant files in which this is the case. V8 has no such two part attributes...either a model is geolocated, or not. The weird thing is that all the legacy FF models that are located but not georeferenced (all but a tiny handful, I'd imagine) show up in V8 as not being geolocated at all...yet they still spit out a kmz that places them in SLO.

Thanks everyone. I got Loft by Spline to work. That's exactly what I needed. I appreciate all the help.

you do need to, select color, adjust 'opacity', apply color then re-adjust and re-apply to see changes [image: 2Fsl_opacity_Mac.png]

Found a company, TerraSolid, in our neighborhood which produces programs for processing of this kind of data. Unfortunately their applications cost zillions, so it seems I have to go on with the started project. There is an open source activity at http://liblas.org/ which seems to be very useful. They feature a list of other commercial packages which seem to be based on the os library. The liblas library is based on work done by Martin Isenburg and Jonathan Shewchuk, who are also authors of a set of command line LAS utilities called LAStools at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/, which seems to achieve much of the essential groundwork for our project. Martin's utility "lasclip.exe clips away points falling into polygonal shapes (e.g. complex building footprints)." If the LAS file contains projection information, the las2dem.exe will also "be able to create a KML file that geo-references the DEM for display within Google Earth". The two developers also produced an interesting article "Visualizing LIDAR in Google Earth" http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/googleearth/ [image: rPUJ_P5122C1_detail.png] For a map view of the same area see: http://tinyurl.com/455gcft