Overall the best winter renders I remember seeing.

Anssi

Absolutely nothing to criticize here... Ok - they might be a little "too beautiful", if you know what I mean.

Anssi

I think that the metal balusters in an otherwise wooden staircase are rather perverse.

Anssi

Pieter,

What image size and other options are you using when exporting to PNG? The fuzziness might be the result of exporting a screen resolution image with antialiasing on. If you already are using onscreen antialiasing (Window menu>Preferences>OpenGL) this might lead to increased fuzziness. The image export options are hidden behind the Options button on the Export 2D Image dialog box.

To export images for online viewing, the best option would be to export from SU at a larger format than needed with no antialiasing, and then to downsample the image in an image editor to exactly the size that it will be displayed on the webpage. Image editors do much better antialiasing when downsampling than what SU is capable of.

Anssi

It's impossible to say what is happening with your DWG file contents without taking a look inside the file(s) themselves. One common error is that a file contains objects that were produced in an add-on, like the walls and other construction objects created with AutoCad Architecture (previously called Architectural Desktop). These must be converted into standard AutoCad 3D geometry in the originating application before importing them into SketchUp.

When importing, SU also ignores entities that do not form geometry, like text and dimensions, imported images and hatches.

SU version 7 cannot read the latest (2010) DWG file format.

Anssi

ArchiCAD is the only 3D application I know that has a vector shadows option.

Anssi

I think Paul is right. My laptop did the same thing while it was luckily still under warranty. Another possibility is the backlight - the same machine has developed a fault during the years where the screen brightness has gotten uneven - some of the "lamps" must have gone out.

Parts for old laptops may be ridiculously expensive.

Anssi

Beautiful modelling work, as always. To me the lighting seems at odds with the sky image that suggests something dramatic. The nearby houses seem a little too clean, "plasticky".

We had sleds instead of bogeys and were able to get into enough danger with them too. Luckily the traffic in Helsinki in about 1960 wasn't what it's today. I remember racing downhill on a snow-covered street and the sled stopping on the streetcar tracks in the middle of the main throughfare the street ended in. Luckily my parents never heard of this...

Anssi

@sketch3d.de said:

SU uses, as allmost all common 3D modelers (besides Autodesk & Alibre modelers), OpenGL currently in old revision 1.5. Therefore no need for a video card of the CAD series, e.g. nVidia Quadro FX or AMD/ATI Fire Pro.

IMO, if you don't need blistering game performance, and you can afford it, using a Quadro doesn't hurt either. Lately we've seen some problems with the consumer Nvidia cards (mouse trails, for example) so their drivers aren't always what they should be.

Anssi

Unfortunately the native 2D DWG exporter doesn't respect the original layers in the model, and the only possible differentiation is between edges, profiles and section cut edges. It is npot very important for me, as my models are small and mostly represent building details, and I usually clean them up manually in AutoCad. The only way to export layers would be to export one layer at a time with all the SU export layer options turned off (export to layer 0) and then re-combine the layers in AutoCad. The export part could maybe be automated in Ruby, but of course if you have tens of layers it is still quite a chore. Maybe running a "flatten" script, and then outputting a 3D file might do the trick in some cases, too

Anssi

To come back to my earlier post, has anyone tried switching ONLY Fast Feedback off, as I suggested. It once helped me with mouse trails on an old card, and I didn't notice any slowdown in performance. I know very well what turning off Hardware Acceleration does to performance, so, of course, finding a driver version that works is the best solution.

Anssi

I think that your problem is that your subcomponents are trying to reference parameters from their siblings. I understand that parameters can be passed only between grandparent, parent and child. In this case I think the culprit is that the Startstolpe and Endstolpe components are trying to read values from the Panel component.

Anssi

It must be a buggy driver version...
You could try if turning off Fast Feedback (from the SU OpenGL preferences) and restarting SU would help. The option used to work for some old cards (like the old ATI on my previous computer) but I think someone recently claimed it helped with his Nvidia card.

Anssi

Judging by his avatar, he too was a friend of Krazy Kat by George Herriman.

Anssi

So sad. He seems to have been a gentle and helpful person.

Anssi

Incredible attention to detail.

Anssi

Somehow the houses look like a cardboard model, and the cars, in comparison, look like pasted from photographs. The blurriness seems to accentuate the "model photograph" effect. Is the image about the cars, or the houses?

Anssi

You can import the csv into a spreadsheet or a database program. I like to use FileMaker (a database) for this sort of work, but Excel tables can also be filtered and sorted.

Anssi

I wonder if importing the mesh using a larger import unit might help. If the triangles in your mesh come into SU very small, SU might be incapable of filling them with surfaces. Then there is the old trusty findfaces.rb, too.

Anssi

AFAIK all i7 processors support Turbo Boost, so that the power of an otherwise idle processor core can be used to overclock the core that has activity. That is too what can be happening here. I have a PC with a 2.8 GHz 4-core i7, and it feels quite snappy with SU, much, much faster than an old 2.8 GHz Pentium IV.

Anssi