@jim said: Fredo's tools also need LibFedo6 - have you installed that also? The lastest is version 3.2a and can be downloaded here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=17947#p144178 Sweet, that was it! Thanks!!

You got it, Jim. It's good up to about 60°...perhaps a little higher, but can't go all the way to plan view. If you try to angle independent Face Me components, they start to corkscrew as you orbit the tree...very disconcerting. There are 3 shadow casters in there to cope with longer shadows, but if you're happy enough to keep within a couple of hours either side of noon, you can delete the top and bottom ones. You'll only delete 2 faces but over half the edges in the model. Edges eat memory too.

I think my first plugin was probably make faces, or MAYBE simplify contours. I was importing terrains from autocad. If you feel like there is some critical document for beginners about how to use plugins that is missing, you would be best to write it yourself. Since you know what you think is missing, only you can put in the content that you think should be there. Then post it and get comments and crits. Sketchucation has a great tutorial forum where you could post it. Maybe if its well received it even gets put together as a tutorial in the SCF Tutorials section. Chris

Thanks Karlheinz, this may come handy for a lot of folks. I'm moving it to the Components/Materials/Styles forum so that it won't sink so easily.

I believe this is a fault with the Logitech drivers. I use a Logitech mouse on all my Macs and do not use their software and never have this problem. As for the Apple mouse (which I personally hate but I am glad someone likes them ) I would look at what the settings for the mouse are in the Apple control panel. I recall there being a setting for chording (multiple buttons pressed at once) as well as settings for individual buttons that can be set to specific actions.

I just checked and it appears to be able to simulate a camera movement similar to what I am asking. I am going to see how it works with V-ray. Chris, I am wondering about this because in order to use the vray spawner, you need to use a work around and I am trying to completely avoid the scene transitions that causes the dreaded jerky SU camera movements. That leaves me with only 100 scenes to work with for the parts in my animation and results in 3 second segments that are just too quick for an entire animation. I use post processing to help lengthen some of these things, but being able to set a number higher than 100 would be great because it would give me more frames to work with.

There are some specific programs to do that. Probably you are on PC and I'm mac user but specially many photo-stitching softwares have the hability to correct linear and non linear perspectives automatically. The Photoshop method described above is OK too but with a little more of hand work. You can take a look at some topographic GIS software too. There are a lot of open source programs to make orthographical corrections to aerial photos and perspectives that needs to play with earth curvature and camera views like you described so may be capable to transform cilindrical distortions. In fact, Google needs this kind of programs to construct most of their 3d maps. If you will need to replicate this process many times I think it could be a good solution as you can even process many buildings at the same time.

You're welcome.

I got it, thanks. I just worked backwards from your suggestion and re-grouped everthing and then double-clicked and painted individual surfaces. It's working now. THANKS!

@dave r said: EDson, I just tried intersecting contours with the sides of a box like you showed in the beginning. I selected the contours and the box and then used Intersect>Intersect Selected. For the example, I had no groups or components. If your contours are inside either a group or component, put the box inside with the contours before doing the intersect. strange, because this exactly what i did (or al least I think i did). perhaps one of the two elements was still a group. thanks anyway.

I see u also made a normal map solo... where should I use it for (I use vray for SU)

Hi telmac, check out the first post of this thread, "How to install and use Ruby Scripts". http://www.pushpullbar.com/forums/ruby-scripts/9467-visual-index-ruby-scripts.html However, I'm not sure how Ruby scripts behave with Tiger...

@edson said: thanks, adam. excelent! best regards.

PERFECT!!!! Thanks Massimo

Thank you for answering my question i was able to figure out what was wrong. i had set the axis on my component in a way that the component attributes interface already assigned a rotation around one of the axis. and for some reason when you change one of the rotation attributes it sets the other rotation attributes back to zero. This is an example of the component axis that I set. if you try to rotate the part with component attributes strange things happen.

This is an interesting thread. But the slipping effect doesn't depend on the size of the model. SketchUp "zooms" in and out by moving the camera, so as you zoom in items close the the camera are lost because both the camera and the view clipping plane are move into the model and the items are now behind the camera. You can zoom manually, my changing the field of view. What is needed here is a "Zoom to rectangle" tool which recalculates the field of view, rather than moving the camera, and, perhaps, also uses 2D perspective to move the center of the screen without moving the target point (rotation the camera). Then the new zoomed view would match the original view exactly - but everything would be larger. Consider these three view of a model. Zooomed out on the model - 35 degree field of view [image: uIp5_zoom1.jpg] Zoomed in using the "Zoom Window" feature. field of view is still 35 degrees, but the camera was moved forward so the brick wall is no longer visible. (This may be the desired effect - but we are not really seeing the same scene, since all of the stone wall in the back is now visible - even the part that was previously blocked by the brick wall.) [image: Gd9Z_zoom2-35.jpg] Zoomed in by using the field of view instead. The field of view is now 4 degrees and the brick wall is still visible. (We see the same scene and perspective as the first image - only larger.) This would be the effect of an optional "Zoom Window" tool which changed the field of view, rather than moving the camera. [image: 5KUc_zoom-3-4.jpg]

Dear All I have the same issue ( I want a single picture as texture ) which I cannot do SU texture editor. I want to understand the UVW mapping for Vray cause Im not understand this placement options. thnx all

when you say it doesnt start, does it not start at all? does anything happen when you click on the SU icon? one thing to try would be right clicking the SU icon->run as administrator. Bit of a guess but sometimes it does the trick.

Ehm, guys... There is a (quite) complete and mostly up-to-date "Extensions index" on the main SketchUcation site. Please, use it as Jim has worked his @ss off to make it as usable and useful as possible with a lot of ways to search, copy forum topic links ("ready made with the insertable bbCodes") etc.