Okay, glad to hear that (and indee the best way to learn and never forget again) but for the sake of others, could you share the olution?

Don't mind at all and sorry I did not post the SU6 version. I should have known as I don't have 7 here at work yet either, only at home.

Hi Fred, It (and many more) is linked here already: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=486 - nevertheless thanks for the head up

Interesting. Thanks! I'll give it a try.

Thank you guys, that's really satisfying to do, just looked at your webpages/blogs - when im more confident with SU i'll ask about the whole rendering thing! thank you for taking the time to respond, Stew

Ah, I indeed looked at your profile when answering sometimes when I click on the SU window,it sys "not responding" or omething (and its icon goes away) but it's still working. @gus r said: This is the same as when I export a jpg (it looks like it crashed but it hasn't). Well, what I noticed with SU 7 particular that its image export is much faster. Before, with SU 6 I wasn't even able to export anything at max (9999 pixel) size and with SU 7, a 9999 pixel wide png and 9600 pixel wide tiff (!) exported in just about 2 minutes.

Hi Angelina, Yes,that is exactly the problem in 3ds - it cannot "recognise" back faces so the only way of handling this is to keep your model consistently "clean" of them. The reason is that SU is a surface modeler and "pretends" or "fakes" solids by making hollow objects always with their normals out. This is also the problem with to sided materials.

Thanks for the responses! Doesn't look the easiest of things to do though. I do think that there is a lot of demand for this sort of thing however. Scott is quite right in that for something like tiles, a texture would be better for performance, but for things like panels, where the joints and setting-out are critical, you do need a component like this. Also single linear arrays with the same property. Stuff like copings, kerbs, ridge tiles and that sort of thing.

Thanks Chris, That did it!

@jean lemire said: Hi Paul, hi folks. Read SU help about the Dimension Tool. The Dimension Tool can auto select lines, arcs, circles and Freehand lines when the cursor is placed over one of these objects and will produce the dimension accordingly as per the following list: for a line, its length; for an arc, its diameter (by default, this can be changed to radius); for a circle, the same as for an arc; for a Freehand line, the length of the segment you are clicking on. Of course, for this to work, you must be inside the context of the object to dimension. If the object is inside a group or a component, you must first access the inside of the group or component. For a line or a polygon, you must click on one end of the line or one end of one side of the polygon and then click at the opposite end of the line or the opposite end of the side of the polygon. You can also dimension from a circle or arc or polygon center. You can dimension from a line midpoint. If you want to use two clicks to dimension any distance between two points from which you can obtain an inference, you do not need to be in the same context. You may use one or two temporary lines to get clikable points to start and/or end a dimension. After placing the dimension, you delete the line. This trick allows you to place the distance between to parallel faces, for example, or form the middle of a face to a point. I suggest that, after reading the help and seeing the video tutorials, you practice with all kind of dimensionning, including these tricks to get the feel of this tool. Play with the settings to position the dimension text, to orient it and to edit it. Many funny possibilities await you. Take a look the three SU files joined to this post for ideas. Thank you for your help, I found it. Thank you also for the files I downloaded

@chris fullmer said: Thats how I end up with menu variables with names like this: Aroofline Btrim Ccolor [b]Dlength E[/b]width Fheight And then if I need to insert something between A and B I do: Aroofline ATshingleType Btrim Ccolor Dlength Ewidth Fheight Yeah, its not my favorite method of organization Chris An equally unfavorable way to re-organize sub components is to drill into the the parent shell (or whatever shell you want to organize), select and cut (not copy) the sub-comp, and right away do a "paste-in-place" without closing the shell. Do this for each sub-comp on the order that you want them to appear. Each time it is done, the cut-n-pasted-back piece will show up at the bottom of the list, at least that is how it is working on my Mac. Matt

This is due to the segmented nature of arcs in SU. When you offset a SU arc, the result is strictly speaking no longer an arc, because the endpoints of all the segments are no longer on the same arc, as the start and end segments of an offset arch are shorter. Arcs and circles in SU are determined by the vertex points of the segments, whereas the offset command is offsetting the segment lines. Note too that if you offset a circle by, say, 1 meter, the distance between corresponding points on the two circles will be more than 1 m, whereas the parallel distance between two corresponding segments will be 1 m... Anssi

Makes sense, what version of OpenGL did SU6 support? But guess that's not the point so it doesn't matter. The offending computer is at another physical site. I will post the info you requested later, but any speculation on why inserting certain components (see initial post) corrects the system's video display?

Thanks. I have successfully completed the process bye your post. thanks again. Adrian

8 gig. Says on the back.

Hi Anthony, Still out there? Wanted to post the following message in a PM, so i wouldn't bother the rest of the community again with my endless cabin, but the PM seems te stuck in the 'outbox', so i'll post it anyway. Sorry guys! You helped me a lot some time ago with the cabin and in the beginning of March we (my wife and I) are going to the shelter to do some preparation and then in April a lot of us are going to help in the nuteringproject (?) (castration and sterilisation) of dogs and cats and education and about 4 or 5 of us are going to do the jobs in the shelter. Unfortunately this is a little group so we cannot do all that we wanted to do (we also were planning to do some jobs in another part of Bosnia but that will have to wait. Anyways, the cabin will (I really hate this) not be created in april but i am planning a trip in July with some other people and now i am trying to manage that we put some concrete floot in the shelter in April, so that we can start building in July. The cabin i liked very much, was your try 'a lot of wood max size' and i am still counting and drawing and calculating to be sure that this one can be build because if it can, then i can ask to create a concrete floor. Some minutes ago however, i heard how much it is going to cost to do that and that is a lot of money (for a volunteer foundation) so i am thinking about creating some kind of wall (only a couple of centimeters high) to put the cabin on (so no concrete inside the cabin). And that could be possible if the beams that you put on the roof would go down and we use balk-05. Pff, long story, what i would want to ask (since you already helped me so much), could i ask you for some more help if i would be needing that? (like which beams have you used in every wall (i am looking too ofcourse but some groups i cannot find the properties) and which one need to be cut in order to achieve that so i can tell the other people how much work we probably have to do and to figure out in what order we have to stack them) And (and this is really bad), i am looking at your skp and start to wonder why the beam on the roofs are not in the middle and see that i made a mistake in one of the beams... Beam-04 really is 4.20 (this is correct) but the hole in the middle really is in the middle (2.10), and not at 2.00. Would this change your drawing? I hope not, and i really hope that this year we can finish the cabin (and call it The Anthony) regards, Fred.

ok... when you put a component from component window you put the coordinates of the component that was created and sometime the behavior of the component it is not what you want. so explote it and then making a component again but with your coordinate. and then click the component and move tool to move and select the point from to move it and positionate it where you want. sorry my english i am doing my best hope to help u

And with that I could finish my first major attempt with sketchup, I present to you, a camera base.

Thank you Gaieus and jessejames! I really appreciate your assistance. I'll give your ideas a try. Cheers, Jeff O.

It all depends when and what situation you need it. Cool question and topic though - both pro and contra examples (not reasons for sure).