I like it. I've done something similar to that.

Thanks Pete & Miguel, could not agree more.

Link to thread on Hatch lines with links to hatch skm files etc - might help.

If you give your lines a thickness in ACAD, they will be imformed with a height in SKUP

I love fish pies! Have tried that very receipe myself. Although it was a disaster. I have no culinary talents...

@gaieus said: Mind if I move it to the Bug reports division above? Sure - at least we can put it on the list to get fixed.

First of all, I'm not a rendering guru somy thoughts on the differences between bump and displacement maps may not be relevant. So if you understand the difference a rendering engine is using them for, you'll realize that a bump map will only affect the way (and "imitate") the shadows cast on a rough surface. Therefore (if both maps are used), a bump map should include the finer surface details rather than big, elevation differences (think of "spanish" roof tiles for instance). The displacement map then should include these "big" surface differences instead. Certainly you could achieve everything combining the two maps and only using it for displacement but I suspect that it would considerably raise rendering time.

We have one other source of information. Of the people who have download RpWallMaker Free (which runs on both Mac and Windows), 1 in 6 have downloaded the Mac version. (1 Mac download for every 5 Windows downloads). One of the reasons we created these free products (RpTreeMaker Free as well) is to get more information about who uses SketchUp and how to reach out to them. (For instance, it is probably safe to presume that not all SketchUp users participate in this forum)

It's my understanding that the underlying engine in SolidWorks has been Mental Ray (for about a decade), yet the implementation of the interface in SolidWorks is so bad to this very day that it is easily worth paying up to $1K for a plug-in renderer like Hypershot, VRay, or one of the newer commercial offerings, if you are doing commercial work where time is money, and quality cannot be compromised. I've also used Mental Ray in XSI, and the complexity is pretty high, and necessarily so due to the need to enable features used for moving, deformable objects in an animation, special effects used primarily in movies, and so on. The power is there, but the ease of use wasn't, as of a year or two ago. My personal preference is something like Podium or Hypershot that does much of the work for you, taking away confusing options in the process, while still enabling renders as good as, or likely better than you could obtain in Solidworks' MR-based renderer (PhotoDoesn'tWorks) after hours and hours of PAIN. Yeah, as noted already, I'm sure they left off Max because no one would use the native renderer for product design renders, especially when it ships with MR included.

@meister said: @al hart said: Send the license code you are entering to support@renderplus.com and we will take a look. Finally issue solved! meister Let us know how it is working for you. We have a tutorial for nXtRender now: Getting Started with nXtRender [image: 150px-Getting_Started_with_nXtRender.jpg] Also, we uploaded a new version: Downloads And, we have started the Help System

@honoluludesktop said: The VM is another program that runs inside the Mac OS. Not sure, but it probably gets its OS from the partition. If you run Windows in the VM, it will run alongside the Mac OS, but it runs very slow. Not really. I don't use parallels a lot; pretty much only to run DoubleCAD and some specialised work related software that occasionally needs to be checked. It seems to run at about the same speed you'd expect the software to run on a similar spec Windows machine, bearing in mind that you can set the amount of memory the parallels VM sees and how high a priority it has and even the number of processor cores it can use. A colleague runs Word under parallels rather than Mac:Word because there are a few feature differences that annoy him. Of course, nobody runs Word by choice on any machine.

REAL IMAGE! REAL VIEW! REAL PHOTO! PHOTO IMAGE! PHOTO VIEW! REALISTIC VIEW! REALISTIC VIEWS? COMPUTER GENERATED REALISTIC VIEWS?

Well, here every traditional pig slaughter starts with letting the blood out... [image: disznovagas2.jpg] ...then either fry it with onions... [image: ver.jpg] ...or stuff it into some special sausages... [image: verivorst1_uudis.jpg]

I'll have to look at my other Vista machines and see if they have open as a default. Perhaps a Photo program I downloaded changed the settings. (Or I have read that the setting may depend on your default Internet Browser) In Googleing around I see where others are having similar problems with Shell Execute in Vista. I need a solution which will work for lots of users everywhere, with lots of different Windows settings. What I did was to create a function to call UI.openURL, and then if it fails use ShellExecute with the NULL verb. This seems to work. (I'm not sure why I call openURL first - just to be friendly to the SketchUp Ruby API I guess) def launch_file(sfile) trace("Launch; %s", sfile) # Try SketchUp call first if (UI.openURL(sfile)) return end#if # try shell_execute if openURL fails shell_execute(sfile) require 'Win32API' shell = Win32API.new("shell32","ShellExecute", ['L','P','P','P','P','L'], 'L' ) #shell.call(handle, verb, file, params, folder, showCmd) iret = shell.call(0, 0, sfile, 0, 0, 1) if (iret == 42) return true end#if do_error("Cannot Open file; '%s' - return value; %s", sfile, iret) return(false) end#def