@mitcorb said: For me, reading as much of the forums as possible, whether seeking an answer to a problem or not, challenging myself with non business modeling projects, "going down blind alleys" and discovering the intricate behavior of the program has helped develop my methodology. It really does take some time in the trenches and soon these things will become second nature to you. Sometimes I come over here and just read and find out all kinds of helpful stuff I didn't realize that I didn't know. Does that makes sense?

Well, PS can be good then (you can also export the image this way from LO for PostProcess)

@notareal said: And after understanding dpi, you can figure needed image resolution in pixels based on needed quality for different distances: http://www.kerkythea.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=68702#68702 This link was very helpful...thanks, notareal! Rafa's explanation and graphs show the ideal DPI at a viewing distance of 3 meters(which is probably what the average viewing distance will be) to be 50 dpi...this is similar what I have seen now when searching -- billboards can be 36PPI or even 10PPI as Brodie says. Thanks to all who answered, Gaieus' explanation especially made it simple to understand If I find out more relevant info, I will post back here.

Related to this if you want a non rotated plan view right click on one of your current axes, and choose align view. Then save that view as a scene to easily jump back to it.

Thanks for the advise. I found what I ws looking for in the new features manual. Gives just enough info to get a handle on the rest of it.

Sorry to be a pessimist, but if you have a reasonably modern Nvidia graphics card (as you seem to, if it has 512 Mb of memory) I would guess that getting a new one will not create a jump in SU performance. When you make big models, the first thing that gets overworked is your CPU - SU is very CPU-intensive, and as it is single-threaded, adding more processor cores will not help either. Anssi

Excellent. Just tried it and it works. Thanks for the rapid reply.

OK! THEY'RE PERFECT! THANK YOU VERY MUCH BYE

Carlsen See this link for concept of what I think you want but need to hear from you http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=24a74ef603a753e19f30f02514717f00. The cone is like a stack of pancakes with decreasing dias. It was drawn using a story stick divided using the line tool divide option 1/10 the height for each step . Each face of the stack was created by staring a new face when the staring circle was extruded up to next step( hit ctrl), the edge at each step was scaled based on the radius at that level on the story stick ( used the entity info box for that to make the cone. The surface png in your original OP was the used to create the texture, see this link for that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVYYdWYRqrg&feature=channel ( watch the video all the way the part you want occurs late). This is just a concept and once you decided on a final geometry then it can be refined Hope this maybe remotely close to what you are looking for

I believe that SU8 broke some stipple abilities with construction lines - at least that is what is reported here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=32730

Dear Fredo6, Have tried every which way to download Lib Fredo6 with no results. Have auto downloaded from this website and Sketchup Warehouse. Have unloaded "all" your plugins and re installed latest version, but to no avail. Round corner and Visihole tool bars do not appear. Very frustrated after spending several hours attempting to reolve this problem. [image: Y2Vv_Capture.PNG]

I reported it to Google ages ago when v8 was in diapers. I haven't heard that they've fixed it...

@unknownuser said: and I surely forgot about it. Easy to do - SketchUp is complex, regardless of what the marketing team says.

The value of LenX which is returned is in inches, even when the model is in centimetres. So you need to compare with LenX * 2.54 e.g.: =NEAREST(CURRENT("LenX")*2.54,350,450,820,900)

Kevin, thank you for that history and information. I've seen photos of the bulldozers hauling the boats above the tide. Amazing stuff. Good luck with the drawing work. I'll be interested to see how you get one. Cheers, Dave

@glro said: plugins using ruby lines of code moving components, or screening of special types of components among all objects in the model, seem to be much slower on sketchup 15 compared to sketchup 8 Do you have code examples with timing to demonstrate this?

I don't know if this would help but the following Input uses a single attribute to set the value taken from Input_val; if less than Min then Min is used, if more than Max then Max is used, otherwise the Input_val is used - not ideal but it might help reduce your code a bit: =IF(Input_val<Min_val,1,0)*Min_val+IF(Input_val>Max_val,1,0)Max_val+Input_valIF(Input_val>=Min_val,1,0)*IF(Input_val<=Max_val,1,0) Regards, S

If you enter a value (without an = sign), in the Component Attributes dialogue, just before you Save the Component it will be 'remembered' when the component is placed and will remain visible until changed by the user; is this what you mean?

Thanks for responding. I'm a kitchen designer and a very experienced SU user. I use it 4-5 hrs a day for the last 5 years. All that being said, it's working now, 6 hours later. Nothing has changed except the time. I have no idea what is different or what happened. Do you think it could be operating system issue? When this all began,I checked the copy/paste function in a Word doc and it was fine. Anyway, thanks again for trying to help-whatever you did, it worked!