Getting the hang of materials. [image: 5sMB_strap_render.jpg]

The drooping strings suggest the plugin Catenary by the famous Remus Knowles. Look in the plugins index in this forum.

this really opened up a can of worms with the follow me tool and i don't think you can use it at all for making this repeatable segment.. not only does it not make the end profiles correctly, it twists the shape as is extrudes making it impossible for it to match up cleanly with another section.. the easiest way i think this is possible is using 1001bit's extrude tool.. you'll end up with twice as many faces due to the triangulation that needs to occur instead of the quads created by follow-me but at least the shape ends up correct. helix.skp [image: vkPK_helix_.jpg]

@tig said: Check your 'Style'. It might be set to display only edges... Thank you TIG, I have done as you said and at last I have colour

Hi all, If you're interested in more of what I've been up to on my site for digital designers, I'll be sending out my first newsletter that has a few highlights from the past 6 months. Please sign up here for an infrequent email newsletter: http://www.getmethod.com On the right hand side you'll see a signup form. Best, --evan

Thanks for the advice guys! I'll have a look on my lunch break.

So I traced the logo using 3d text Thanks for the response [image: web.jpg]

Man, you guys are good! Turns out I had in fact "purged" my model, moved all the hidden stuff to a separate file. I'd forgotten I'd done that, and since it was hidden I guess I never missed it when I scaled down my beastie. Can't get one past the experts!

@dave r said: By the way, Intersect does not intersect coplanar faces. It doesn't? See, I learned something else... I'm sure there are a few issues with the original drawing, I slapped it together in less than an hour without the carvings. I did take another look at the fan component and found a number of mistakes that I can correct. Playing with it now and am found a number of edges that did not line up to a plane, fixing them and I was able to get a partial intersect with the face. Half of the fans are still not intersecting which is strange since they are exact duplicates of each other...

one method I have used for this is to copy the whole terrain down by the height of your curb then to create a block from the extrusion of your roads and intersect it with the whole model. after that clean up the model and you will have curbs and roads at a lower level than sidewalks. there is some work involved in it but it works.

Hello Galland and welcome! I am not sure but I guess this is the one: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=28957 The plugin is attached at the bottom of the first post (a bunch of ZIP files - read the change logs to know which one you need)

Oh damn, I will definitely look into the mirror more often (although I do not know if it is worth the horror)

As Thomas writes, "Use only as many edges as you need..." A small hole can look round with relatively few sides while something like a round table top would benefit from having more sides. The same goes for arcs. A small round over will look fine with three or four sides but a larger curves need more. Don't waste geometry where it isn't needed but don't skimp where it is. In models you find in the 3D Warehouse, it could be they are drawn with few sides on circles and arcs to keep file size down. This is the case with many of the components from the @Last days. It could also be they were drawn by someone who didn't know how to control and utilize the tools well or they were just sloppy. With the Warehouse you get all sorts.

(sorry, too late) Basically, curved surfaces consist of planar facets whose edges have the "smooth" property. By displaying hidden geometry you can see those smoothed edges as dashed lines. Now you have all options for rotating/moving a texture image on a face. Also there exists the "sample" tool (which is the paint bucket while pressing the alt key). With the sample tool you can copy a material (including its the texture orientation) and transfer it to neighbouring faces. Thus you can wrap a texture step by step on a curved surface (from facet to facet). Another way is to use the planar projection feature. I hope you don't mind if I just give you ths link that explains the topic in more detail: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/sketchup/thread?tid=305938c70981364b

Hi Bonie, SketchUp 8 has introduced solid tools which will calculate not only the area (as before with faces) but also the volume of "solids" now. I am not sure how these solids are translated when exported (SU Pro can export into CAD formats) but I guess they retain their solidness and can be used further to calculate these volumes there.

I first simplified the contours a bit to be able to drape at all (even from contours seemed to stall). Then closed the open ends of the parking lot and draped the road which indeed did not seem to fully drape so turned on hidden geometry to try to identify the problem. I painted the facets one by one until found out that in one of the handicapped parking lots) in the corner) there was some problem. Redrawing the edge from the corner point seemed to solve the issue. Untitled.skp

Download version 7 here: http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60107

ok, all good info. thanks everybody. Love having a system that works in place. Cheers, GREG

Thanks guys for the highly interesting material. I'll follow up all these interesting and hopefully helpful hints. It's nice to see how well this community can respond to various SU-related needs - even in case they are at quite some distance from the main topic.

Thank you very much, will come in handy!