Yes it did fix the problem. I'm wondering though: for setting the geolocation I go to File->Geo-location menu item, then add location, then select region, then grab. Is it the only possible way? Doing this I end up with a satellite image being imported in my scene, and I usually have to unlock and erase it -- not a big pain but I wonder if it's the only way. One more question: what is the default UTC in SketchUp? I think it was -8 or something? Thanks!

@Gaieus : please don't laugh at me but I thought TIG was being ironic, since I never used the geolocation feature and never even notice its menu voice
Thanks for explaining it so that I could fix the problem!

I'm still experiencing this issue and you can imagine how much it ruined my SketchUp experience Is anyone else facing it?

Hi, I did record a short video for showing the shadows bug I'm experiencing. I can't say exactly when it started but I'm sure the only thing that changed since when it was working is that I updated my Nvidia drivers (there's already a thread about issues connected to the latest Nvidia drivers). Here is the video (streaming hosted on my DropBox, I didn't want to upload it to YouTube or Vimeo):

SketchUp 8 shadows issue

I hope I'm showing the issue in a clear way. Any idea about what's going on? Do you think it's drivers related? I'm using Octane as renderer and other applications /games requiring the latest and most optimized Nvidia drivers, so downgrading is not an option. I'm getting used to working without shadows but it's a pain. My current drivers are the 285.62 WHQL and the rest of my specs are in my signature.

Thanks and have a nice time!

Hi mitcorb, I tried some of them and no one can produce proper result with the situation in the screenshots - they all break where the 3 edges meet. Pipe Along Path is not processing the request , it complains because the edges are not a valid path. It could be I did something wrong when using the plugins, or maybe none of them is intended for this scenario.

The best results I got are the ones using Follow Me on various sub-paths and then intersecting and cleaning the mesh, which is still a viable choice if the mesh is simple but it becomes a no-no when things get too much complicated!

Too bad, though I can see a lot of power in that plugin and I could buy it the same. Working on separate edges will create a lot of weird overlapping, just like with the vanilla follow-me.

I'll happily buy it if it will do what I need

Do you think it can also manage a situation like this one?

As you can see in the highlighted part some vertices of the structure are part of more than two egdes.

Thanks for the fast response Thomas! I'm going to give it a try and post my impressions.

Let's say I have a volume defined by edges only (I erased the faces) and that I want to make its edges solid. Is there a plugin for giving edges a thickness? It would be even better to be able of choosing the shape that is used for the extrusion. I know I could use the follow me bu tselecting the whole set of edges won't do and working on separate sub-paths would lead to a huge time waste and give overlapping meshes where the follow-me surfaces of different paths cross. Any idea guys?

@hellbank: thanks for the link. As I said earlier in this thread, I'm not a fan of the cloud; there's not a single cloud service out there that can give us a 100% safe service with total protection of our privacy and that can promise no outages or server issues. I simply don't trust the cloud for anything really confidential. That being said, using Dropbox for keeping my plugins and resources in sync between many machines is giving me no concerns in terms of outages (I still have local copies, it's the beauty of Dropbox) nor privacy ones (my plugins are downloded from the net, like many of my resources). I also use Dropbox for sharing files online (my tutorials, images, ect) and since I'm sharing them already, I don't care about "privacy" etc. I think putting confidential stuff online is always a risk and should be avoided as much as possible, no matter the platform we use (email, social network, cloud storage, etc). By the way, I really don't think Dropbox is less safe than GMail or any other Google service -- remember when Google pushed Buzz on the users making their provate contact lists visible to everyone else, also giving a frequency of contact indication? Well I'm glad SketchUp and YouTube are the only Google services I use

Thanks a lot Chris, it worked like a charm. Do you have more advices for similar situations? Are you aware of any plugin for recreating at least some of the bridging tools you find (for instance) in Max? By the way, thanks for your plugins

Hi there, I did search the forum but I can't find the answer I look for, I'm sorry if it's out there and I'm asking something that has been answered already.

What I want to do is to bridge a selection of edges or faces together. In the screenshot you can for instance see two circles that are facing each other: I would like to connect them with a cilinder in this case; is it possible to do it without a plugin? Thanks!

I think I'll try to work like that, with no shadows, hoping Nvidia will put out at least a fixed beta driver soon! I'm rendering in Octane so I can study shadows there almost in real time. I love that renderer so much.

By the way, I'm on desktop (my main machine specs are in my sig).

Thanks for the info Stevo! I'll also drop a line to Nvidia. I tried BF3 but I don't think I'll buy it, even if I'm quite a fan of DICE -- it's a while I get deluded by much hyped titles that are turning to be average or less than average (Dead Island, Rage, Crysis 2, BF3 etc). Crysis 2 did impress me on the technological side after the DX11 Ultra patch, though!

Let's hope Nvidia will fix the issue fast, I'll have to work a lot with SketchUp in next weeks and having no shadows is quite bothering; I think your bug is much worst though, so you do fine trying older drivers!

I'm running the same driver but I can't reproduce that bug. I do have issues with the driver though -- shadows are not working anymore, no matter the settings I choose. When I turn on the shadows the model becomes all dark and nothing changes when I tweak the settings. Is anyone else having the same problem? If so, is him/her running the same driver?

Thanks a lot for the tip, it's very useful indeed.

@Brodie : I never had that weird problem, if it will happen I will post here. Can it be the issue is connected with the Maxwell plugin? I don't use it so I can't test it. Thanks for letting me know though! About SugarSync, I tried it in the past but I felt the Dropbox way was more streamlined, so I went for it; I actually remember there was a reason in particular that made me stick to Dropbox, but a lot of time passed and I don't remember anymore

@pmolson: I'm really not a fan of the "cloud" so I know some of your fears quite good In my opinion Dropbox is the safest service of its kind and it's definitely not going to disappear without notice, since they have millions of users (also big companies among them) and they just got one more huge funding. Beside that, everything you put in the Dropbox is also copied locally on the machine you use, so if the online version is not accessible you still have the local one. The best way to fight fears is obviously the usage of backups: you can setup a script (or do it manually) for doing a whole backup of the Dropbox folders you are wanting to be 100% sure you won't lose, putting it in an archive and periodically erasing the obsolete versions.

Hi there! One thing I don't like is to waste time setting up plugins and resource files after I reinstall the OS on my machine or I need to work on a different one. I also don't like wasting time updating the plugins on all of my SketchUp installations or moving resource files around. SketchUp is having some settings for changing the default folders for a bunch of stuff but not for the Plugins, and even using that built-in feature we'll have to manually change the path on each copy of Sketchup.

As a solution to all that I started using symbolic links: they exist on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and are basically a way for creating a folder or file that points to another location. As an example I'll detail what I did on my Windows 7 64bit machine, but you can read these two interesting LifeHacker articles if you want to know more or find info on how to do it on Mac (as I said it would be possible to do the same on Linux but as we all know Google couldn't care less spending some resources for giving us a native Linux version of SketchUp):

http://lifehacker.com/5496652/how-to-use-symlinks-in-windows
http://lifehacker.com/5154698/sync-files-and-folders-outside-your-my-dropbox-folder

1. A Dropbox account
[url=http://www.dropbox.com:11fq4uld]Dropbox[/url:11fq4uld] is a great file syncing/sharing service that I highly reccomend. Please go to their site to read more about what they offer and why it's so great. The free account is 2GB but you can earn more space following some [url=http://www.dropbox.com/free:11fq4uld]simple steps[/url:11fq4uld] and even more using the referral strategy; by the way if you need to create a new account please consider using my referral, that way you will give yourself and myself 250mb of extra free space! This is my referral: [url=http://db.tt/wBxnfcg:11fq4uld]link[/url:11fq4uld].

2. Where to put the stuff
I created a Settings folder in my DropBox and I use it for syncing settings ad resources for various software, like SketchUp, Painter, Gimp etc. In this case let's say we want to create a subfolder for Sketchup where to move our plugins. Since we are creating the folder outside of the Public one, no one will be able to access it except us, provided we are logged in with the client. Our final path will be something like :

C;\Users\YourUserName\DropBox\Settings\Sketchup

3. Move the plugins
Now you can move the whole Plugins folder from your SketchUp installation right into that path. In the end you will have no Plugins folder anymore into your SketchUp installation (we'll fix that in a minute) and a path like this in your DropBox :

C;\Users\YourUserName\DropBox\Settings\Sketchup\Plugins

4. Create the symbolic link
Open Start Menu, write "cmd" in the search box, right click on "cmd.exe" and start it as Administrator. Once into the command prompt write "mklink" to read the short help info for the mklink command (it's always a good idea). Navigate to your Sketchup installation folder; in my case I typed

cd C;\Program Files (x86)\Google\Google SketchUp

and I then issued the command for creating the symbolic link

mklink /D Plugins C;\Users\YourUserName\DropBox\Settings\Sketchup\Plugins

5. Done!
We now have a Plugins folder again into our SketchUp installation path, with the difference that it is just a symlink pointing to the real one on DropBox: the stuff we put on Dropbox is both phisically available on our machine and at the same time stored on Dropbox servers, so we can access it from any machine simply installing the Dropbox client and logging in. This was just a short introduction to the technique, you can of course extend it to your resources (textures, kit bashing, etc). The beauty of this method is not only in the fact that you have your stuff saved in a safe place, but also that you just have 1 location to update (the Dropbox one) and multiple installations of SketchUp will access it. I have three machines and keeping the resources and plugins updated among all of them was quite bothering, so I'm glad I discovered this method! A last note: you can do the same for pretty much any software

6. What if something goes wrong or I just wanna go back to the way things were?
In that case just delete the Plugins symbolic link and then move the original Plugins folder from Dropbox back to your SketchUp installation.

EDIT:
I don't use Dropbox anymore and I also decided to only use SketchUp on the main workstation.

Thanks a lot to everyone for the feedback!