Dwain, that sounds like an excellent project. I do some reverse engineering too and find that SketchUp makes it fairly easy to do. There aren't very many plugins that are "must haves" in order to draw furniture. In fact other than the CutList plugin, you can draw most things with the native tools. For drawing non-circular curves the BZ Spline tools would be handy. The Wudworx suite definitely speeds up drawing joinery. There are some basic plugins like Weld and PurgeAll that are useful for any sort of drawing work. Where are you on the SketchUp learning curve? If you are sort of at the apprentice level, I think it would be wise to learn to handle the native tools well before adding a bunch of plugins.

Hi PB and welcome! You probably insert components, not groups (and you should not explode them). Components could be called "special groups" and their feature is that if you edit one instance of the same definition, all other instances will be affected. If you only want to make one piece different, right click and "Make unique". Only edit it afterwards.

And then we have this from TIG: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=33305&p=293710#p293710

+1

You know I am (also) a lawyer and have written a couple of contracts myself (the last one about some $10,000 about two weeks ago) but often I cannot wrap my head around these Google terms (they are also contracts between them and you). In my opinion, what is not explicitly forbidden (by a contract OR by a law behind it) is allowed. They are careful enough to cover their interests so if they do not make it clear what we should not do, we can do it.

Thank you for the reply Jim. I haven't decided on which data would be needed, since I was not sure how to approach defining different areas where the products will be located. Any advise on that? I would like to start with five aisles. Some of the racks will be able to hold six palletized items, and others will hold eight palletized items per section of rack. I would like to alot an area to use for each product. Once the racks are filled, I would like to populate the floor area, between the racks, with the same product but stacked in varying configurations from one product to another. I would probably make a component for these groups of pallets. Excel is my guru program, so I would not have any difficulty putting the data into any order needed. Is this what you meant by format, or were you asking what I plan to use as the delimiter? If you were refering to the delimiter, then probably a comma. I have thought about using our item numbers as the name for the components. I thought that might be a way to link the data to Sketchup. I know I can provide a full pallet number for each item. I am not sure how much work this is going to require, but I do not mind. It would be worth the time to be able to provide a way for others to visually see the ammount of inventory versus empty space available. If needed, I can post pictures/video of our setup as a visual aid. Thank you again Jim.

Thank you so much, I'll have a look!

Ok will try get in touch with them. Thanks!

Thanks!

@tridem said: I'm pretty new to wings, but I believe it's very improved since then, with features like sculpting, tweak mode, boolean operations and so on... So I gathered from reading the PDF manual. Looks pretty good! Still not perfect, but I don't expect perfect when using Freeware, which I am still going to be doing until my budget has room for other than rent. If there were any justice in this world, software and food would be considered necessities, right along with beer and wine. I think I will be checking out w3d this weekend. I'm swamped with school stuff this week. >sigh< Anyway, once again, thanks!

Doesn't Blender's UI look the same on all platforms?

Good thing in Fredo's plugin that it keeps the sizes of all the facets and the rest of the model as a whole (so the image will fit exactly as it does on the flat one). Bad thing is that it screws up UV mapping even when I position the texture before subdividing (i.e. all the texture pieces should still be positioned - or not? I will have to check). Edit; even if I "pre-position" the texture on each facet first, the plugin screws everything up. I wonder if Fredo could do something with it.

You have to have the lines on the the surface so that you have a smaller area to paint with the logo. There are a number of ways to draw the lines on the surface. You could draw a rectangle and use Push/Pull to push it through the curved surface and then use Intersect to place lines on the surface. You could use Tools on Surface or just draw the lines by hand. Since the surface is curved, you won't be able to position the material using the pins or the other position adjustment tools.

There are two plugins here. Download the ZIP archive of FredoScale as well as LibFredo (under the other link). Extract both archives to your Plugins folder. Restart SU. Then open your Preferences window (Window menu) and under the extensions tab, activate FredoScale. Now under the Tools menu, you should have a "Fredo collection" item with FredoScale in it. You can also activate its toolbar from the View > Toolbars menu (Make sure to save your toolbar position first under the same menu item)

Open the group for editing first. Remember, you can put mustard on the sandwich until you open the wrapper.

I hope it works alright for you that way. I think it would save you a lot of time and it will certainly help you keep the file size down. I don't know enough about ACAD but is there a way to automatically apply hatchings based on some parameters?

Wiped the Registry for SU8 and restarted, and now the menu's back, but not sure why it went away in the first place.

Dave, Thanks so much for your clarifications and your PM explaining things. You answered a number of questions about process and workflow. Putting all the geometry on the default layer (thank you TIG) solved my immediate problem. I'll work on the other issues in the next model. Best, Jim

You said you were using 24 frames per second. Are you animating the view, or actual objects? If you are animating actual objects, what ruby script are you using? (don't worry, I've heard of them all here) Also, if you want, I could do it for you if you post the .skp file.

I know this probably wouldn't work in most situations, but it did in this simple one. Your method of enlarging the area around the image will probably be what I use in the future.