Thanks for the tip!

I should ask our archaeologist for some plans and results of his recent excavation. Because under the monastery, there was a small emperial palace by the 'Salier' (that was a dynasty like Welfen and Staufer). And it is not sure if there was also a roman building.
The current excavation was about a celtic prince seat from the Lathène/Hallstatt period. Under the remains of the monastery wall, he found a circular rampart (Ringwall).

But if I included this, the file would become very heavy...

At least I would like better camera control (sometimes the camera fails to show placemarks with a flat angle to the ground)

@gaieus said:

fighting

Yes, I think this requests would add much more value to Google Earth.

I began yesterday morning to "learn" editing kmz files. It was not too difficult to implement the main features (the rest of kml is still a closed book to me). But when I see what of those features is already for years available inside Sketchup, a bit of disappointment comes over my face.

• GE balloons => leader text with arrows
  + add rich content (background color, font, image)
• placemarks => scenes
• fly-to animation => scenes combined as animation
• turn on/off model parts => export layers as separated collada files
  Working with source code is time consuming and confusing. You see, mostly we only need the export capabilities for these features. If ruby could control the collada exporter and merge the resulting files in a zip or kmz archive it would be a nice plugin. Unfortunately I don't know ruby and I don't want to risk it, because who knows what the Sketchup team is already developing secretly...

The mediaeval monastery model has 450k polygons (plants will increase that), but I don't want to deprive you of the model and uploaded it to 3d-warehouse. Ok, not the full model, but an optimised version.

It is one of the first interactive models in 3d-warehouse, using rich content in balloons and much else. Maybe it can 'push' some new features for geo-models. Because that's what machines cannot do. The automatic modeling techniques are good for converting storagehouses and backyards into boxes. But especially for tourism and other purposes, this could become important. Imagine 'fly-into-building', museums and castles with tours and info texts...

Intel plans already to combine hundreds of atom chips (or even smaller chips) to spare energy. So I think multi core support is something that should be solved by operating systems and not by every single application. It is insane when every little programmer has to struggle with this.
I can imagine that virtualization could supply a solution. With VirtualBox I can simulate a 32 core system. I have not tried if it is possible to simulate less cores than I actually have.

Does someone know more about this?

The Sketchup developers said that they will optimize the communication between processes in the graphics card and processes on the cpu (because they are closely linked).

Also in my region, the barbarians abused the roman remains, mainly as stone quarries. From one villa rustica, there are still 2 out of ~35 columns left - used as grindstone by a blacksmith.

By the way, how did you make the fire basins (is that the english term?)? When I place a KT light in a png image of a flame, the image turns out too bright.

I can recommend recuva (analyses the disc for deleted files and shows if/how much was overwritten).

Some operating systems make shadow copies, that means "save" does not overwrite the original file, but creates a new and the older version is thrown out of the index. If you have for example vista, right click on the file and go to file properties.

I added the surrounding buildings, the cloister, the refectory and the sacristy.
Unfortunately all in gothic architecture and not romanesque, so it took longer than I wanted. For that the effort was worth it, I uploaded some components to 3d-warehouse.

I hope they will be useful to someone.

I have already 120 components, already very confusing. I should optimize my naming strategy.

Kerkythea is busy. But in the meantime I can post an image from some days ago:

The monastery had a well (quite deep - 84m through the rock). I found a reconstruction drawing from 1852 for the bucket elevator (there are also other proposals like a wooden crane). I used the "aged materials pack" (was very difficult to adjust for the size of this model).

I've still been working on it, but I think I can start rendering today (with now bump maps, shininess, layerd materials etc)

By the way, I just found a way to make it look more real, "real 3d"
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=22754&p=192152#p192152

This is not spam , I just found some things that I have experimented with one year ago. The idea is so fascinating, but until now, it was not yet as succesful as I had dreamed...

The idea was to place a grid in front of the screen, that shows only every second column of pixels to each eye. This principle is used for commercial displays without special glasses (those displays have up to 32 different perspectives!). It is not difficult to calculate the grid width and the optimal distance between grid and screen for the desired viewing point. I printed the grid on an overhead transparency and attached it on a plexi glas of exactly 3mm width. There was a big surprise: I had forgotten that the subpixels (red,green,blue) are aligned in columns and cause interference

again with rotated screen: the subpixels are now aligned perpendicular to the grid
If you find the correct perspective, it really works! Not perfect, but a interesting feeling of deepness.

So I'm not the only one with an installer archive?

Although Sketchup as a professional modeler does absolutely not fit into Googles profile, I wonder if they would really give it away. Sure, is not anymore essentially needed for Google Earth. But after years of only little touch on @Last's product, the Sketchup team has begun to develop things deep in the core of the program. I have the impression it will be useful to Google again someday.

I think Sketchup cannot, but Kerkythea can render cylindrical/spherical projections. I have to try this out, because I just found a really great program for photo panoramas, Hugin (freeware).

As a "geo-modeler", I think it is a new, second step to populate GE. After they have bought Sketchup and wanted people to fill the virtual world completely with buildings, there is still not at least 1% of all 2 billion buildings modeled. Many geo-modelers concentrate on high quality, also many concentrate on masses of low quality. But anyhow, using Sketchup takes a bit much of time, especially for getting resources. So this is a great tool and chance for Google Earth. At least for box houses (I myself feel lucky not to live in a box )

The quality might be bad, but for the normal GE perspective (ie. 100m distance), it's perfect (and low model complexity!). I still wonder what should encourage me to built now hundreds/thousands of low quality models, which can be efficiently done by automatic techniques. Especially the selection of prepared towns looks like what the machines have left.

Although they said, it won't replace Sketchup, I have the impression that they will finally abandon geo-modeling as a main purpose of Sketchup. That could mean good news for architects and all other Sketchup users. Sketchup could develop into something more professional.

Include "repair broken lines", repair broken polylines, arcs and circles.

I still use many older versions depending on the purpose, especially important: the different collada exporters and the different handling of models on upload to 3d-warehouse.

Has someone else found this: in the Windows version, Sketchup does not update the title bar of the window after loading another file. For example you start SU and it opens the standard template "untitled", you go to file -> open ... and open model.skp, but it still shows "untitled" in the titlebar.

SU7.1, WinXP SP3

I don't know, would be a good feature/ruby plugin.

I did it always the complicated way: copy one model file, open the copy, delete all geometry, open second model and draw a reference line to the origin, paste it in the copy of the first file and move the reference to the origin. Eventually change the mid number.

Has someone a better solution?

I also like calculations in the measurements box.

The scale tool and measurements box can do something like '5' = five times as large, or '10m' = 10m long, but not yet '+2m' = 2m longer as it is.

This is very useful when we have a fraction number or a irrational number as current length. I tried it already to make Sketchup show dimensions with maximum precision, calculate with this precision and then type it in the measurements box. This way, lines will never snap.

In some threads I read also the idea of a "smooth selection" for making smooth tools. Just like it is standard in 2d-graphic editors. Most of the existing tools could be much more universal, especially for organic modeling. Imagine you scale or move a smooth selection: the faces/points in the selection's border area will only undergo a fractional amount of this transformation. This would allow great possibilities for ruby developers.

@plot-paris: modifiers
This would be a great (SU only) feature, when exporting to another format, it could be necessary to apply the modifiers irreversibly (make unique components...). A subdivide modifier could easily be changed for creating a high-poly or low-poly version of the model!!! Currently, I can achieve this only with intelligent component usage and modifying the geometry inside components by hand.

I tried the last one again with twice the RAM (SU7.1, textured, shadows): 2.8 f/s
Calculated to the full ram, it would reach the same value as on XP, but of course the host operating system also needs a bit ram.

I'm still trying to find a way to use Sketchup on the operating system I like. Currently, Sketchup 6 & 7 (not yet 7.1) work in Wine on linux poorly rather than well. It is possible to use them, but we have to accept the bugs in the texturing tools and in the save function. Neither does Google contribute to make it more usable, nor does Microsoft think about supporting the wine project. Today I tried a different way, running Sketchup in a minimalist XP in a virtual machine on linux.

The first impression: it runs WITHOUT ANY bugs. And the further tests surprised me, because it is always said that virtual machines are not a good solution, that means running 2 OS should be much less efficient than using wine.

I used an extremly complex test model and did two different tests with the ruby command 'Test.time_display':

1. lines and shaded faces,
2. lines and textures and shadows.
   The results depend largely on the model that I used, so it is rather a relative comparison.
   ****```

frame rates (frames/second), the higher the better

 1. shaded faces                               2. textured faces + shadows
 normal XP    Wine     XP in VirtualBox        normal XP    Wine    XP in VirtualBox

SU6 5.1 2.1 4.2 0.34 0.075 0.125
SU7 4.9 1.55 4.01 0.33 0.065 0.13
SU7.1 20.5 1.27 5.2 5.3 1.09 1.65

While wine does not much more than supplying the windows applications with missing windows kernel files (...), I needed to run an additional operating system. With the program nLite, it is possible to make an XP installation cd with <160MB and a final install of 350MB, it needs only 50MB ram instead of a normal XP with ~400MB ram.

The numbers show the performance increase from SU7.0 to SU7.1. Also, at least for textures turned off, VirtualBox can already compete with Sketchup on XP. I think the difference for the textured case is because hardware acceleration was simulated (there is also an experimental version of VirtualBox which uses the real hardware for acceleration, but did not yet work). Additionally I should say that I allowed VirtualBox to use only one quarter of the ram.

I just tried Exalead, which is a technology preview of a european search engine with semantic web and artificial intelligence.

@solo: I wondered that your blog is on place 9 for 'sketchucation'!