How could we forget that topic, Simon?! And although in the course of your posting there, not much feedback was given, as you can see, people did read it and yes, they remember it.

Talking of Precision Measurement! The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the US railroads. Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.) Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB’s. The SRB’s are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB’s had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB’s had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds. So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else

Thanks for the replies. What I wanted was a line texture that would not result in objects i.e. closed rectangles. I had the notion that an image texture would be less resource hungry than a bunch thousands of lines. At any rate, I created it in AutoCad without allowing the ends to connect and imported. Will turn into jpg later. thanks again

Thanks Cyberdactyl, good read Mike

The BEST solution is to export from Layout7. Its renders are far better than from Sketchup directly and you can specify a line weight without having to use custom styles.

@kwistenbiebel said: I hope the Japanese version says 'Banzai' and the Scottish version 'Skeeeeeetchuuuuup'

@tig said: What you have model so far looks pretty well thought out... except... I suggest you make all of the elements into groups (or components if they might be repeated). O my, I wish I had started out doing this (making each major new area of the model a layer). Trying to select stuff after the fact, group it, and layer it, is pretty tedious and delicate work. However I have done some of this and it is useful to be able to turn on and off entire design elements like Roof, Walls. Thanks for the thought-provoking tip!

i guess gap is the wrong term, i meant distance from the edge of holes to outer edge.

And here is why those faces were missing: http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=36261

If anyone wants to try the Panoramas, the latest versions of IRender nXt have the panorama feature. You can download a trial version from: http://www.renderplus.com/htm/download.htm One of the IRender nXt users, Boothy, has posted a number of Panoramas on his web site. (click image to start panorama) [image: mad_thumb.jpg]

so obvious... and yet. Thanks!!

Good solution TIG, thanks. Mike

Bugsplat is a little program (not from Google) that tries to get useful information on a crash before Sketchup is completely closed. So the Sketchup developers may have some hints in the bug report where the error might be.

Welcome Sanjay, Just jump in a start havng some fun Mike

Hi John, hi folks. The Dimension Tool will auto select a full line or a full arc or a full polygon or a full circle if the cursor is placed on the line or any edge of the other entities. The Dimension Tool, however, can attach dimension lines to points (endpoint, midpoints, center points and construction points). So, for some nice effects, you can add temporary points or edges from which you will use one or two endpoints to attach the ends of a dimension line. When done, simply delete the temporary geometry. Even better, dimension items can be moved and rotated and can also be used with the Move/Copy and Rotate/Copy feature to get linear and radial arrays. Just ideas.

Thank you, all, for your links and suggestions! Much appreciated. I like the visual guide, especially. I have to say I'm very thankful and impressed at the patience demonstrated by all of your responses. Cheers to you all. C.

That was it. Figured it had something to do with the style settings. Thanks much, Team SDA

Im fairly sure you do need the quotes, as the new version i posted didnt work properly without them. And did the exploding and recomponenting thing not work?

@tig said: Another way that avoids 'stretching' is to make the dormer a group/compo and initially to have it as a simple gabled rood at both ends that stretches through the main roof plane. Especially useful on curved or odd angled roof/dormer combos... Edit the dormer, switch the view settings to show only the edited item [hide rest of model] and now select all, pick intersect with model and then you should get the main slope's cut-lines appearing around the dormer's geometry. Erase the unwanted parts of the dormer and close the edit. You now have a dormer that fits neatly onto the roof... Here's a tutorial... [attachment=0:1ewmyq3t]<!-- ia0 -->Intersecting Dormer.skp<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:1ewmyq3t] If you have a half-made dormer with a wrong slope then in a similar way edit it and select all of the sloping edges etc and move them axially through the main roof plane, work with only the edit geometry showing - intersect them with the model and the cut-line of the roof plane will appear; erase the excess part - this way often easier than trying to stretch edges and vertices... Wow, between the original suggestion and now this, I think I've got a great new set of skills to tackle this problem. You're right, the sloped faces are causing a significant portion of my headaches. I think making a grouped/component "double-dormer" and editing it as necessary will save me a lot of grief. I'm so hung-up on having perfect geometry that I get wiggy when I have "junk" floating on the inside of my houses, not realizing that it can actually save me a lot of time if used as a tool. Thank you guys!