Eiffel tower designed by a committee...

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@chrisjk said:

I think Spinoza would have loved Object Oriented programming - we are all sub-classed from God.

That was the idea of my namesake, St Anselm of Canterbury
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To me it seems to be part of your professional ethics to do it well even if you don't like the client's idea.

I have always admired the way you work with SU output.

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The good thing about SU is the way we can sort of directly manipulate the model by pushing in and moving right until we are satisfied. Using BIM packages still resembles more filling tax forms than sketchupping. That's why I am still dreaming of a SU with a more direct link into BIM rather than increasing the BIM'ishness of SU.

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The lorry driver that chopped the front left quarter of my car off a couple of years ago(I escaped without a scratch) wouldn't have noticed it at all unless the other drivers hadn't started signalling him.

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Americans are free to choose a health system they want. The European model, whatever you want to call it, has main benefits over the traditional American system:

• it costs less. Americans spend a larger portion of their GNP on healthcare than Europeans do.
• it gives better results. Europeans are generally healthier. I don't know the real reason, maybe it depends on the relatively large proportion of Americans that are without healthcare.

The European system is not the same everywhere. There are national and regional differences, with the French being generally the most envied. Our Finnish system is rated somewhere in the middle caste, but I really cannot find fault with the care I and my family have received when in need of it.

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I have posted it before...

I went to a small but good Escher exhibition in Helsinki last weekend
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The segmentation cannot really be helped. It comes from the facetted nature of SU models.

For a different approach, instead of DWG, you can export an 2d image in the PDF (or EPS)format to transfer things to Illustrator. This has the added benefit that instead of only lines, you also get the faces exported as flattened colour regions. You can also export a vector or hybrid PDF from LayOut and edit that.

Just my 2 cents,

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I think you have to use an administrator account to be able to authorize SU.

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@tomot said:

I had a client that decided to increase the size of the kitchen by 2' which meant the building envelope increase 2', which affected everything from foundations to roof slope. That change occurred when I had almost completed the working drawings. Many clients mistakenly think because your using a CAD system, making changes are as easy, as fixing a typing mistake.

This is the situation where a good BIM package should excel. You make the change in the model, and all the documentation should "automatically" update. Archicad and Revit are almost there. In traditional CAD you really have to make the change in all the required separate documents yourself.

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Frascati,

Note that when you print a PDF on paper, using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Viewer, it defaults to a "scale to fit" page scaling. This will reduce an A4 sized page, for instance, by adding additional margins round it. To get a print to true scale, you must set Page Scaling to None. So you shouldn't need to calculate any odd scaling factors, just use 1:1.

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My recipe for a good BIM app:
Take one half of Archicad and one half of Revit and mix throroughly. Wrap it up in SketchUp.

Seriously, what you need depends on your workflow. If what you want to do is model in SU and just produce drawings out of your model, I would rather recommend a general purpose drafting application instead of a BIM app.

Using Archicad or Revit would in most cases mean building your model anew from scratch. Of course, using a BIM solution can help in controlling and streamlining the documentation. The limitation is that the information still has to be fed into the system - in most cases using a BIM app resembles more filling a sheaf of tax forms instead of Sketchupping.

I have been on and off of Archicad for a long time. I first tried it maybe in 1989. By now it is quite a mature product, but it also bears somewhat the burden of its long history - for instance, it still relies heavily on layers. I do not think much of it as a general purpose drafting application, but I know people who use it like that and even prefer it to AutoCad.

I am now trying to learn Revit. Compared to Archicad it has even less standard "drafting" features, and I understand most of its users use some CAD app by its side to do detailing etc.

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You can download a plugin from Google to enable DWG/DXF import for Google SU 7.1 at
http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/download/plugins.html#dwg

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I think weld.rb is a free download from http://www.smustard.com

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Martin,

I run out of superlatives.

Now you can make an animated version of Brideshead Revisited...

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Ian,

What you need depends also on what you plan to model. You didn't give many details about the computer that you plan to update. Computer generations come and go, and after a time upgrading components might become difficult or expensive, and not worth the time and effort.

The Google site has an impressive list of hardware recommendations for SU that would send most people directly to a computer store. However, if your modelling needs are modest, like mine, for the moment, IMO, you can make do with much less.

Generally, 1...2 GB of memory is quite enough for SU, especially if you use Windows XP instead of a newer OS.

IMO, this is what your present machine should have for upgrading memory and graphics card to be worth your while:

• a Pentium IV processor with a speed more than 2.5 GHz or a slightly slower core2duo
• an AGP or PCI-E slot for the graphics card. AGP cards are getting scarce.

It does not pay to put the latest gaming video card in a very old machine, and if you have an AGP slot, they are even not to be had. I would recommend an older type GeForce card - in our parts they cost about 50 Euros.

My 2 cents,

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The nice thing about the new i... chips (and the newer Xeons too) is that they support what they call turbo boost. This is meant specifically to increase performance of single-threaded applications like SU by selectively overclocking processor cores in use if other cores are idle. My work machine with its 2.66 GHz Xeon runs SU noticeably faster than its predecessor that had a 3.6 GHz Pentium IV.

I remember that some time ago when many people upgraded their computers from P IV s to Core2Duos or Quads, the forums had quite a lot of posts by people underwhelmed by their new ultracool whizbang computers that had a slower clockrate than their previous single-core machines.

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According to Dell brochures, this model comes with either an Intel GMA on-board graphics chip, or one of three models of lower-end ATI Radeon graphics cards. The Intel graphics don't support OpenGL hardware acceleration, and the problems you describe point to this direction. If the graphics card is an ATI one, you may be in more luck, but you would have to look for a suitable driver, possibly from the ATI pages. ATI cards have had their problems with SU, but I understand many users have been able to use them OK with SU.

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Yes, it can be done. Usually the question is, why should you? Editing SU models in SU is much easier than editing MFACE entities in AutoCad, even so that if you need the info as a 3D model in AutoCad, I would continue to edit it in SU, and keep it in a separate DWG file XREFd into the main AutoCad model for as long as changes need to be made.

I haven't checked what happens to smoothing within AutoCad.

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I also found SU in 2003, version 3. I downloaded the trial, played with it for about 15 minutes and decided I couldn't do without it. Discovering the @Last forums was also a decisive experience - everyone was so helpful.

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