Never mind - I was also "enlightened" by a Google employee when I first put my hand on SU 7 last year.

Jeff, I can see the faceting of curves in Sketchup as being a big issue. It is to me as well. My background is mechanical engineering and I have used many different CAD systems over the years. All of them used true arc and circles so this was never an issue. Of course they also had filleting (Corner Curves) which could easily solve your problem in one step. All could create a fillet between two lines, arc and line, or two arcs. In your case it would be between the left arc and the horizontal line at the bottom right. All that said I wonder about your need for accuracy in this case. In the real world everything has a tolerance and not suprisingly when you start to build things over 6 to 10 feet your measuring tools start to throw their own errors into the mix. For instance how accruate do you think a tape measure is? Sag, flex, temperature, material and other factors add to the issue. This is why in building construction an error of 1/8 inch is an everyday occurance. Aerospace is the only industry I know of that has addressed the problem with any success. They are starting to use a new technology called indoor GPS. This uses infraRed lasers mounted around the ceiling with the receiver in a hand held measuring tool. The user takes hits on the object to be measured and the 3D coordinate data gathered is uploaded and overlaid on the original CAD model. Boeing developed it.

@unknownuser said: i might be misunderstanding so... Nice tutorial! You understood. Actually, I'm working on my tutorial's Ruby section and I want to suggest that this is a good example of a deceptively simple drawing that is really helped by having a Ruby. Using this is easier: [image: PdVW_roofster.gif]

And in the Shadows dialog, check "Use sun for shading". Now the amount of shading can be controlled by the Light and Dark sliders. Dark=100%>no shading. Anssi

i think you would need to make your ground plane the same proportions as your image ie: 1024x768, which is 4:3 so it could be 100' x 75' for example. then when you create a new material in SU make sure to type these dimensions into the create material hieght width boxes before you select your image. paint the ground plane the you can scale it (make sure you scale uniform) and move it to fit your scene.

@unknownuser said: i'm on a quad mac and do not have the slowness either.. SU is very responsive until i get into very high polycount territory.. when you say it runs slowly, are you talking only about how long it takes to open a file or are there other issues as well? most of my skps open instantly (no noticeable pause at all).. files with a lot of textures/poly (25MB+) take maybe a second or two to open.. you may have something set up weird or SU may be running normally.. it's hard to tell because i'm not quite sure what you mean by 'slow' I may well have something wrongly setup. It took me quite a while to discover that the Open GL option "Use fast feedbaback" was troublesome with the nVidia video card on the Windows machine. But stopwatch in hand, importing a 76 KB skp component into a 34 MB drawing takes 30 seconds on the Mac against 7 seconds on the laptop. Opening the 34 MB file on the Mac is faster than on the Windows machine (40 sec, against 50 sec), probably due to the newer, faster hard disk. Movement lag when orbiting is about the same on both machines. And sometimes drawing on the Mac seems to get somewhat sluggish (no measurements yet). I am evaluating the possibility of using large single files for projects, originating any number of views and cuts. Modifications of the base file can be automatically updated in Layout, avoiding a lot of work and the possibility of errors.

i think the doubleCad will work.................just as soon as i figure out how to use it thanks everyone for the feedback.

@honoluludesktop said: I was thinking about b-splines, loft, and other similar 3d modeling tools. if you need feature based NURBS modeling go for ViaCAD 3D which is avail. for a handful of bucks even for OSX and with SU import too. hth, Norbert

Hi Noblerabbit, hi folks. For your question number 1 : Yes, see attached SU file for ideas (Scenes 1 to 3). For your question number 2 : No, unless there is a pluggin that can do that. However, you can use SU to help in the tedious task of optimizing the cuts. Don't forget to add some extra for the blade width (around 1/8 inch or 3 mm depending on the type of blade). See attached SU file for ideas (Scenes 4 to 8). Furniture parts list.skp

Hi Solo, Just trying to be creative, and didn't check if the following was previously posted. In the first model, create the desired scene, delete all, and save as a new file name. Then open the new file, find the drawing origin, and import the second model into it (on the origin), and go back to the scene as necessary. Worked on a small example, didn't try with anything big.

Hi Gaieus, I just finished to install my rss reader when elgin wrote his post... I wanted to be more present and reactfull on this forum which help me so much.

If there's not enough contrast trying editing a jpg in say Gimp and increase its contrast ?

@onono said: Anyone else have print preview go buggy on them? Someone else complained that their print preview was black. Did you try printing all the same? Was the PDF hunky-dory? It might just be another OpenGL problem. Anssi

@Panga: I used VirtualBox 3.0.10 on linux. I found the solution on wikipedia: VirtualBox does support OpenGL (only 32-bit windows XP and Vista, linux, solaris) after having installed the "Guest Additions" (see manual, it's like a setup cd that you put in the virtual operating system) @juan974: I have not yet thought about it... Interesting . The XP on the Virtual Machine cannot be completely compared to a normal XP on a real computer, VirtualBox does not support all techniques that Sketchup can use, like hardware acceleration. Also I used a very stripped down Windows XP which can of course not use the full ram (in my case I allowed it only to use 192MB) because otherwise the host operating system cannot work. The minimal XP install cd can be created with nLite. Luckily SU7.1 works now also in Wine on linux without problems, so I only need VirtualBox for placing models in Google Earth. The above test made me wonder why SU runs faster in a virtual machine than in wine...

Not confusing things at all - it was mentioned a page or two back, and part of the same subset of problems.

Don't worry, I didn't know the answer until a couple weeks ago when I saw a post by Gaieus linking to it.

If you explode the instance in your model, the component will still remain in the file. Go to your component browser (Window menu), navigate to "In model" and purge it from under the popup menu triggered by that little, blue icon next to the search field. OR keep it for later.

think of a zip file as a suitcase.. it's one package that you can put a lot of things in and carry as one.. otherwise, you'll have to download/transport all of your socks/shirts/etc separately.. here are the direct links to the zips you need (2 separate zips) -- LibFredo 3.4b.zip: http://forums.sketchucation.com/download/file.php?id=34712 FredoScale 2.0g.zip: http://forums.sketchucation.com/download/file.php?id=27660 you can unzip on your desktop and move the files into your plugin folder (and i actually suggest doing this just so you can understand what's happening) when you unzip LibFredo3.4b, you will have two items: a folder named LIBFREDO6_Dir_34 a file named LibFredo6.rb when you unzip FredoScale 2.0g, you will have two items: a folder named FREDOSCALE_Dir_20 a file named ZLoader__FredoScale.rb take the 4 items that i've highlighted in red and move them to your sketchup plugins folder --C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 7\Plugins\ -- relaunch sketchup and the plugin will be installed.

Thanks!