@rabbit said: On an only slightly related topic, a mate of mine has a computer that sits in the corner of the office and all it does is dial up the bank every day at a certain time and download statements. A few days ago a guy opened it up to put in a network card, and he grabbed a screen shot of a windows 95 message saying it had been running for 3760 days!! I have asked him to send me the message screenshot, but that must be a record for a win95 machine...? Not sure if I'd trust a Win95 machine with my bank statements...

Hi Dan and welcome to SCF. You can make your animation in SketchUp by using scenes (as you probably know) but it has two cons: it's not easy to set up a nice, smooth fly-/walkthrough animation although there are plugins that make it easier and you can become quite proficient after a while. Also, there is the "dreaded shadow bug" in SU (again,mainly walkthroughs) which will cause your scenes flicker while the camera is moving through the borders of shadows when shadows (not "use sun for shhading"!) are on. But you probably know this. The shadow bug could be overcome by using a 3rd party renderer which can interpret SU scene animations To show the stages, animated section cuts and the witty use of layers hidden/unhidden with certain geometry on them would sound perfect for a native SU output however section cuts cannot be exported into external renderers (at least not that I'd know of). So first of all you will have to deide if you really want to use another application or straight SU animation and it will probably depend on the way your animation builds up.

The question has been settled. I have found the solution myself. Regards Karlheinz

Thank you nemosuke! That's likely the problem. Cheers, Jeff Olson

thnaks for the pointers ill do the searches myself, but if anybody knows off the top of their head is there a script to export every object seperatly, this is all i need to go ahead and buy the pro-version for my projects. thnaks again chuck

But does he wear them??

hheehhe, well I'm glad you got it to a point that you feel like its working good for you now. I'm glad the tips and tricks session video helped too! We all put a lot of time and planning into our presentations, Chris

If you get the text tool then click on nothing (i.e. dont click on any geometry, clikc to the side a bit), type in your message and press enter twice, that should do it.

Gaieus sent me the following messages: @unknownuser said: Yeah, there have been several occasions (demand) for a chat channel at SCF (we could actually implement it quite easily even in a way that all the users registerd and signed in at SCF are automaically signe in with the sme details in the chat). The only concern was that a forum will always allow the "acumulation" of knowledge while a chat is ephemeral and is easily lost. I'll have a closer look now, thanks. later: @unknownuser said: I still don't see anything wrong with this, Chris (after reading the whole topic).In fact,it could be fun! This is helpful don't you think? Chris

@gaieus said: Sorry for being late (and I'm not even sure this would've helped) but here's another tip just in case. Ah yea. I've resorted that some times with windows flying off screen.

@kwistenbiebel said: I never used the 'projection tools', but can I use it for that? @wo3dan said: On the other hand there are some ruby scripts that you can apply for this job. One is called: projection_v6.zip with its own toolbar. Or an older one that works with projecting faces (not 'stand alone' edges): project_faces_plane.rb (Both from Didier Bur) Yup, these should do the job perfectly.

Pete, nice hut....yeah thats the one.....how did you do it for sketchup? or do we need render engines to amplify (or bump) the texture so it would look realistic and not flat? Tesmeko

now theres a challenge. Hard to say how feasible it would have been without seeing your model, but i think a lot of your problems could have been solved with some constructive grouping. As for the circles not lining up, if you make sure you always line your circles up to the same point in your model and always use the same number of sides you shouldnt have too many problems. The thing to remember here is that all geometry in SU is made from straight lines, so with your circle youve got to make sure all the lines match up. A cleaning tool would be very useful, although i believe there are a few rubies that already do some of that. A healing tool could be pretty dangerous in the wrong hands. I've got images of shoddy house models with thousands of healed faces everywhere... And lastly, the zoom issue is a known problem called clipping. I think its something to do with openGL, although im very rough on the specifics.

Many thanks ! I found out what I needed to know.

you can also use the mirror.rb more powerful

Start with the Warehouse: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=a064872dcb1dc05f194f34774bdb7e18&prevstart=0 http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=fcebdc2db3f9b4c01ca36424313a787e&prevstart=0 http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=e316f8c4460d21e61d225d751745cd28&prevstart=12 http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=dd219f47f06b84eb43b9eef399a0841d&prevstart=12 http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=43d00f1f63d726b043b9eef399a0841d&prevstart=12 http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=b18434a7db8a5f7843b9eef399a0841d&prevstart=12

Awww, I'm trying to be lazy about it. When you have ~400 components on a level, replacing all the text can be kind of a chore. I'll just plop them down after I do the mirror function.

Thanks Tom, I think Ive worked it out, Ive been a bit lazy with component axis til now.... Re the fires: we are ok here, but about 50 miles away its horrific, death tool is now 220 and climbing, several small towns have literally ceased to exist, places that I know, I'm having trouble getting my head around it. I was in the 'Ash Wednesday' fires of '83 where we had a firestorm moving at 68mph, what happened on Sunday was worse, people just did not have time to get away. And it's not over yet. baz The Age newspaper has the full story. http://www.theage.com.au/

I tried starting with a cylinder, texturing it and converting it to the shape you need via FFD, but the textures went crazy...