Hi Danielle, Once a "cut through" component is placed in the model, it will always glue to (and cut through) the plane it was placed on. If the face of the two storeys are exactly on the ame plane, it should cut through there but if there is the slightest difference, it won't.

Hi Kanonfodder, hi folks. To add to Gaieus's post, the lines must also be in the same context. For example, if 3 lines of a rectangle are in a group and the fourth line is outside the group, even if the endpoints are connected and the lines are coplanar, the face will not close. As for drawing curved surfaces like screws, you need to approximate them with a serie of faces that are all connected by common edges. Smoothing theses common edges will give the appearance of a curved face. Practice with a simple cylinder to get an idea. Draw a circle and pull the circular face to get a cylinder. If you show the geometry that is normally hidden, you will see that the cylindrical face is composed of rectangles that are arranged in a circular array. Each of the edges that are common to two rectangle is smoothed. Try to unsmooth theses edges. You will get a rough looking cylinder. Smooth them back to see the nice smoothed look reapears. Read the help about smoothing edges. Search the forums for screws, helix, spiral, etc. Just ideas.

ah, I just discovered the problem with the material naming thing. the name-input-line keeps the focus, even if you hit enter. the only way to get the focus out of it is to either change a setting of the material, choose another tool (doesn't work, if you use shortcuts of course) or click somewhere in the stage (a bit uncomfortable, because quite often at this moment the paint bucket tool is selected and you don't want to paint anything). the best way would be to type in the name and then hit enter to confirm and draw the focus away of the name! (any Googlers listening? write it down somewhere, cause unless you change it right now this is something you easily forget )

Unfortunately, there's not an easy way to do what you're talking about. As you scale things like this your textures will start to line up poorly. One could imagine a ruby script that fixes this, but it wouldn't be particularly easy. Better texture support is a common feature request for DCs, so it's good to see a concrete example of why it's needed. Wish I had a better answer for you. Cheers,

Bonnie responded to my voice message. She seems to have some email problems. I ordered these books (link below) looked them over and they look very very good for what I need and want to do. I would recommend these books to anyone that wants to get a little one started with SU which I think can be an excellant learning tool. Still interested in knowing about anything else out there that might be good to work with. I am excited, soon, wonder boy can teach me some stuff. http://www.3dvinci.net/ccp0-prodshow/MBB_PDF.html

OK, NVM... I just found the "Make Unique" right-click option. This has solved my particular issue

Wow, thanks. Looks a lot better than most of the LuxRender ones. Is there a good photo tutorial like http://www.3d-software.ch/fileadmin/pdf/SketchUp_Maxwell_Tutorial/tutorial_sketchUp_maxwellrender.pdf this one?

I've been working with a tiny model too. One of the things that I did, aside from changing the precisions, is to work in a factor that is 1000x the real world size. When I finished all my precise work,I scaled down to the real world size and everything looked just fine. Then I "Saved" and lost a bunch of faces. It appears that SketchUp does a "validity check" on saving and finds all the things that become distorted when you scale down. I just couldn't work as tiny as I needed to no matter what.

Well for what it is worth I got what I was trying to get to by doing some different things. NOTSkewd.skp

Hi Perk, I thought it was Jim (Foltz) who wrote such a plugin for a similar issue but I couldn't find it among his scripts. Try searching the Ruby forum maybe I remembered wrong.

So, Ref; Default layer zero; It's a greedy DEFAULT layer that you cannot delete ... zero cannot delete anything, or move its contents into your current layer. Solution; - Keep the 'entity info' window where you can see her. (Always! ... not unlike 'properties' in AutoCAD) Ditto layers window. Again, always there. So: Go to your model; define components by select-dragging top left to bottom right over just one component. Go to your newly opened 'entity-info' window and click on the drop-down arrow, by layer, and choose the (appropriate) layer, (Not Zero,) With each. If in doubt - go to Layers and type in an 'add' to make a descriptive layer. You'll see what we mean when you get there. But just in case it's even more complicated ... maybe you have inherent components that are not entirely sure which layer they belong; If you don't mind exploding and re-componenting (although expensive on file size,) the ultimate fail-safe is to have absolutely everything in the layer you want; if its got confused; 'explode' and re-layer. Anyway, ref your question; Is there logic re secondary layer ... yes.

Hi Pot-paris sorry it was of no use Yes you can use the CTRL key when moving, and pick the insertion point or grasp point each time. The idea with the technique was to be able to continually paste an object(and pick its grasp point), with it sticking to your cursor, as the Autocad copy function until you press exit or as in this case release CTRL&V. NB the selected object thats being copied and pasted has to be exploded,does not work with groups or components but it works OK when pasting inside groups. Quick video - don't know if that helps its my first one - sorry no sound. I agree with you "it would be marvellous, if this 'remember-last-grasping-point' function when copying and pasting could be added to groups as well"

Yeah, that's what happens (if I read you correctly).

Hi Mike, As for the image distorting in the pool; Jakob is probably right. If you project the an image on a curved surface, it always stretches on sides. If it's due to s ditorted scaleing, right click an choose "scale definition" (or what).

@al hart said: @unknownuser said: ...As an aside - Is anyone aware of a good way to develop applications for Windows and Mac at the same time? Does the Mircosoft .NET tool do this, or is there some other tool we should use? afaik .NET is Windows only very common in this area is Qt from Nokia (formerly Trolltech) hth, Norbert

You might be able to export solidworks->SU but you certainly wont be able to get anything usable from SU->solidowrks. This is because SU is a poly modeller and so only approximates surfaces, whereas solidworks is a solid modeller and uses maths to describe its surfaces. With regards to exporting and importing, it is pretty easy to approximate a mathematical surface as polygons (i.e. exporting from solidworks to SU) but near impossible to go from the approximation to exact mathematical solids (i.e. exporting from SU to solidworks.)

@marchy said: Installed the program again as administratorbut same error message came up !!!! opened as administrator and it worked closed it down went straight back to icon, same error message. Do i have to go in as aministrator every time? I installed SketchUp as administrator and now I can just double click on the icon and I don't get an error message. Although ometimes Vista does lots of weird things.

A real time viewer wouldn't be utterly useless. Rather interesting idea. Saves you from having to reload the file if you use it for reference and someone is currently working on it. Haven't tried what happens if a file is opened with the viewer. I find it highly unlikely that anyone will use it...

thanks for yours helping.