Sweet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You guys are awesome. Thanks!

Oh, i get it (finally). Your have to check the soften coplanar box. Thanks, gilles. You will save me a ton of time. One question - after softening and trimming the surface, I unsoftened to get the grid back. When I do this the diagonal lines come back as solid lines (un-hidden edges). Is there any quick way to make them hidden again? Thanks again!

Sorry, let me explain better. If I create a terrain from scratch (with the grids) I can't select it as an entire surface, I can only select all the individual squares. How do I maintain the grid but get the flat group created by the sanbox "from scratch" tool to act as a single surface that can then be subdivided? Thanks for the quick reply.

Is there a plugin that I can use to trim sandbox terains with. I wan to trim a grid along a curve - a road for instance. I can use intersect with model but then I have to erase each individual grid or grid part that is outside the boudary I want to keep.

I was finally able to get it to work. In the VirtualDub help file I discovered that Windows Media Player doesn't like anything bigger than 2 Gigs - this project produced an animation of about 3 GB from 60 scenes. So I made 3 Sketchup model files. The first had the scenes 1-30, the second had scenes 30-60, and the third had scenes 60 and 1 (to produce the loop-back-to-start animation). I exported all 3 animations and they each worked on WMP. I then brought them into VirtualDub, deleted the overlapping sections and spliced them all together. This produced a 3 GB file that runs succefully in WMP. Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the tips Brodie. VLC was not able to play the video. I'm running it through VirtualDub now. It is able to open it and listed several errors. i'll try saving it from VDub and see if WMP can play it. Will report back. Just wanted to say thanks for the quick response.

I am attempting to export an animation from a 100 mb model. Animation settings: size 1980x1114, ratio 16:9, 25 frames/sec, all other settings at default. sketchup exports for about 15 hours and produces a 3GB avi file. Windows Media Player will not open the file and displays the following error: "Windows Media Player cannot play the file. The Player might not support the file type or might not support the codec that was used to compress the file." I can export from smaller models at this resolution and can export from this model at lower resolution. Is there a limitation on what WMP can play or what SU can export? Anybody have experience with this? Thanks. (using SU8)