Adam, A point to always bear in mind when working with SU are its limitations when modelling circles, cylinders, arcs etc. Remember that circles, cylinders, pipework etc are made up of short straight line segments and are not really circular at all, but many sided polygons that "cut the corner" of the circles etc they are approximating. ........... When importing CAD data eg from AutoCad, the original geometry may be modelled as solids etc and have no problems at all in their original (CAD) form with respect to gaps, slivers, fit etc. When these solids are imported into SU, all the cylinders, pipes etc are approximated with many sided polygons. This sometimes creates gaps and slivers where the original geometry in its CAD format had a perfect fit with no gaps at all. Particularly noticeable if you zoom in. On the whole SU does a pretty good job when importing such curved CAD data - but it can only ever approximate the original. ............... Hope this helps Howard L'

thanks for your reply+help I'll try them out

Many thanks all!

If you right click on a component and "Change axes", you will modify the component axes only - the world axes will remain in their original position. Right click (carefully) on any of the three world axes to place them elsewhere (if I correctly understand your problem). Hidden geometry is under the View menu. It will reveal any hidden edges and faces as well as softened/smooth edges (like those of a cylinder or sphere for instance). This can be handy if you want to position some texture on them as you cannot access the position texture tools on curved surfaces but you can on the revealed facets when HG is on.

Very cool...thanks, Landie!

Pilou's Fragmentation? http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=208807#p208807

I was actually going to use the Cad/ drafting process as an analogy, because in some ways it's similar. Like you I have to track my hours at work, so I can't just play, and I am expected to produce visuals of reasonable quality. My answer to this is to always have something on the go. So I'll do a set up before work with a focus on on issue I want to learn. Then let it render away, review at lunch, make some adjustments, and let it render again. In this way it's not like drafting, as once your have imported the scene, worked with you materials, and lighting etc, the computer does all the work. By keeping the scenes simple, I can at least move forward in the learning process, because I know I have a long way to go.

Thanks, all. Just when you think you've reviewed all the plugins out there...

Thanks that worked great, I didn't even have to reboot the computer or anything else.

Try the right-click context-menu...

pretty much the same thing as jean's method but done on the wood(?) itself.. [flash=660,405:1g7vpdzm]http://www.youtube.com/v/cWlF6KgsUM8?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1[/flash:1g7vpdzm]

@krisidious said: there are a few "cures" I use reduce the scale of the entire model, I find that large models don't allow you to work on minute details. yell and rant at the clipping gods!!!! The main problem with #2 is if any edge element becomes much less that about .005 inch (real measurement) it causes the bounded face to destabilize, and it cannot be reformed as a face due to "open loop" syndrome. I used #5 a lot too, till I discovered the Perspective solution. Now, not so much.

You can zoom, orbit and pan with a 3-button mouse...a video is always better YouTube - Google SketchUp Toolbar Series: Navigation [flash=480,385:ttxhvef5]http://www.youtube.com/v/hc4TeDuEbfU?fs=1&hl=en_US[/flash:ttxhvef5] If you dont wanna watch the video, just click middle mouse button and left mouse button at the same time to pan Edit: oops, didn't read your post well, you wanted NO mouse

Oops, sorry I didn't give a link. I dug around a bit and I found this thread where he writes up a snippet of code that will import x,y,z data from a CSV file. So you would just want the beginnings that shows how to read the file into SketchUp. And then you would need to figure out a way to assign properties to components and such inside your model. http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=28904 Sorry I am not much help here right now. His code is good, but it's not everything you need. So it will require some more work to get it to even begin to do what you want.

Aw,shucks. All I did was bump the thread

TIG has answered your inquiry in your No Plot Layer question.

Don't know if this is related, but today SU crashed several times when I tried to export a animation. I tried other smaller models, etc. to no avail. I finally uninstalled SU 7.1.2 (my own numbers) reinstalled 7.1.1, and again 7.1.2, both times with no success. I noticed that in some cases, the failed export left a empty *.avi in a folder at a higher level then the data folder. So I moved the model to the Win desktop, opened, and successfully exported the avi. Maybe SU has problems (in some instances) with long path names. My data folder name- C:\Documents and Settings\Atelier\Data\Job\Gfh Gary Hokua\Models renders\Furuta Hokua Desk The folder I found the empty avi on crash- C:\Documents and Settings\Atelier\My Documents The desktop subdirectory (folder)- C:\Documents and Settings\Atelier\Desktop **Adenda 1: I just finished the export and the file ended up in C:\Documents and Settings\Atelier\My Documents ???? I must be doing something s*$&^d** Adenda 2: Of course, the default folder is the above, I just had been assuming that it was the data folder. Everything works now????

su2kt.rb have a file that you must add the plugin for sketchup, and another that is the intala SU2KT3_0 where it has already done this, I suggest you save your export to the desktop of your cpu, may work .... I will be available, my e-mail contact is: redautocad@gmail.com Hope that helps. Hugs.

@jim said: The biggest limitation is that SketchUp does not have true arcs or circles. Everything is exported as line segments, and unless you used a lot of them, the segments could be visible on the finished part. Of course, this does depend on other factors such as the radius of the curve and precision of the machine. A small radius will probably not have visible segments, for example. The shop is going to take the .dxf and generate gcode to run on the cutting machine. The gcode ironically does support true arcs, but again Sketchup exports only line segments so that is what the machine will cut. The more segments you model with, the smoother the finished part. CNC machines and 3d printing have become affordable at a hobbyists budget. It's really too bad because Sketchup seems like a perfect fit otherwise, but this lack of curves makes it hard to recommend Sketchup for applications like cnc and 3d printing. Wrong! The plugin Phlatscript (sketchup to gcode) can transform the segments of an arc in instructions that specify a radius in the gcode.