Yes, with LightUp you can "bake" shading effects on your materials and export those in certain formats. There is a fully working, 30-day trial of it - give it a "trial" (Sorry for the terrible pun but I could not resist )

Ray, This is what you should see in your plugins folder (CadFathers Icons.zip is optional - another set of icons.) [image: iYj5_2Dtools.png]

Well, if it works only without hardware acceleration, it means that your video card is not fully OpenGL compliant. This also means that it will not "share the burden" of displaying the model with the processor so when you get to the limits of the processor, you will experience problems with bigger models sooner. All in all - your SU performance may decrease. Best would be to upgrade to a better card (well, sooner or later). Have a look at the Apple OpenGL Chart for a comparison. Otherwise I would recommend to upgrade your SU version to 7, too - although the Hardware requirements may even be a bit higher (especially OpenGL version - I think SU 6 needs 1.4 while SU 7 needs 1.5)

Hi folks. See this SU file for ideas. Tricks for working with large files.skp Use the Scenes tab on top of the model window.

I´m glad I could help. And the beer indeed sounds good! Happy sketching!

Well done Elisei, nice work!!! And very generous to offer to do this for Ronan....

@edo said: Hello all, just got in this forum...so im gonna need your help ... Ok, i want to make a soccer stadium about 30.000 seats and i would like if is posible invite in this stadium on each seat a fan that's interested in this stadium and i would like to put there names in seats ? is it posible with this software or i need look for another software. any help with this i would apriciate, thank you all Edo 30,000 seats? Each with a different name? OK, you can do it... but what for? It takes a lot of computer power to just display the seats, let alone the stadium...

@chris murphy said: Thanks guys. I think SU is going to be fun, and i look forward to all our interactions. Thanks again. Chris And good luck with your house!

Hi folks. If you specify 2 sides for the arc, you will indeed get an angle. This can be used as a trick to get a real fast 90° angle if you use the "Half circle" inference. Then, each side of the angle is at 45° from the axis of the angle. This is a qucik way of drawing roofs with a 45° slope. Add a base line to the arc to get a triangle and push it with the "Push/Pull" Tool. However, the apex will be smoothed and thus, will require unsmoothing. Just ideas.

Ah Ok, thank very much.

That just might do. Thanks!!

I like the "rectangle the bottom" approach. Keyboard shortcut R gets the Rectangle tool. Start to Rectangle the bottom of the board. Type 14',1.5 (if inches are your default, you don't need an inch symbol). This assumes you want a fourteen-foot, 2-by-something. Once the bottom is modeled, Bucket with your chosen material or color, then PushPull up (to 5.5 if you are modeling a 2x6). If you bucket first, all six faces of the board will be finished.

Hi Rod, Every component has an insertion point. This point is the component's axes. Normally, the axes is placed at one of the component's corner. Use this point as the focus when placing a component to your model. When you place a component and the insertion point seems placed in the middle of the component. Most probably, the axes is still at the component's corner, but you view it from the opposite side. Insertion points in Dynamic Component behave differently though. Harrynov

This is "the" Newbie forum here!

Your best bet is probably to browse through the gallery...lots of stuff in there. Here are some quick links to get you started. http://forums.sketchucation.com/search.php?keywords=%22straight+su%22&terms=all&author=&fid http://forums.sketchucation.com/search.php?keywords=%22straight+sketchup%22&terms=all&author=&fid

Hi guys, The exported kmz (zip) file contains a kml file with the camera definitions of the scenes. It will add a <LookAt> tag to every scene you have in the skp file and can even "play" them as an animation. So briefly and strictly speaking, there is indeed no camera location in the Collada/dae file itself however there could be some possibility to extract the camera data from the kml file itself and use it somehow for the model file (out of my realm of course). Note however that these camera locations are pretty far from (i.e. not exactly the same as) what you can actually see in SU so I am not sure it's worth the effort. See a kmz file with three scenes (you can "play" those in GE and renaming to zip, you can access the kml file, too) which would look something like this: [image: VgSH_CameraLookAt.png] GaieusLoc.kmz

This is great! Thanks a lot. I can deal with the funny names.

I'm with Chris on this one

That did the trick! Thanks Thomas! What a great set of plugins you've developed!