I think I have seen others with many questions too, and I don't see anything wrong with that (of course I would recommend reading the documentation and watching the videos etc. too)

Anssi

Hope you all are all right

Anssi

A good name sells well?

Snack found in Austria

Note that when importing 3DS files SU does most of this job for you if you check "merge coplanar faces" in the import Options dialog (button in the right bottom portion of the import File dialog box)

Anssi

My name is Anssi and I have tons of great free components and Ruby scripts cluttering my harddrive - and I almost never use them. I also always promise to start learning Ruby but never do that. I always just start modeling and bother about organizing the model afterwards. I almost always group things before turning the group into a component, to skip the embarrassing phase where my creativity is required for inventing a name to the b****y component.

The component is glued to a plane. Right-click on it and select Unglue. This should help. Note that it will stop cutting a hole if it was doing that.

Anssi

Are you sure you have the latest bugfix version of SU?

Is your SU preferences file (plist) corrupted? You might try trashing it and restarting SU.

Anssi

@geh4evr said:

A lot of people are saying it could wipe out Earth.

They are idiots.

Anssi

@plot-paris said:

that sounds like a great way of teaching about historical buildings. my architecture history teacher at university only had slides that were almost as ancient as the depicded buildings themself. quite difficult to pay attention.

You were lucky

Some of my teachers showed b&w images from books with an episcope - try to keep awake with that

Anssi

I have a collection of a zillion components, and I almost never use them, the same with Rubies, except about three.
Styles
Inches
Export file formats except JPG, PDF and DWG
Dimensions very seldom.
I never need an area in square millimeters-square meters would be good (when using mm as the model unit)
I have toyed with Fog about two times, and Layout about the same.
Animation-it generally just distracts people or makes them seasick.

Anssi

It seems everybody is doing these nowadays. I think I have recently seen adverts about similar things at least from Acer and HP.

Anssi

@remus said:

Maya and autocad both support multiple cores for modelling

No they don't. Rendering and some other things like writing/reading files and the LISP interpreter are able to be multithreaded.

I wonder if the inferencing system is the greatest resource hog in SU. It reminds me of the object snap system of AutoCad 15-20 years ago. If you turned on continuous Osnap the system slowed down into a crawl. Then Autodesk rewrote it, and your old 386 started flying again...

Anssi

Cleerssen,

At least some of the clipping, flickering etc. in the model is caused by the model being so big and far from the origin. The model seems to be scaled, perhaps by a factor of ten. The scale is in meters, and the model is more than two kilometers across, and the building has stories that are 33 or 34 METERS in height. You should scale the model down to the intended size, and move it nearer to the origin, unless you are designing a house for Gulliver...

What I guess is that the CAD files you were importing were made using Millimeters as the drawing unit, and you used Centimeters as the import unit in SU (Options button in the Import File dialog box)

Anssi

Your network might be the culprit too, if you are printing the file to a network drive. You might try printing to the desktop or some other local folder and see how it goes. I often get corrupt image files when exporting to a network location, and they usually are OK when exported to a folder on my desktop. I am also suspecting the network for the similarly truncated PDFs (with some lines and texts missing) we recently got when printing to PDF from AutoCad with Adobe Acrobat, and that printed perfectly when repeated another day.

Just suggestions

Anssi

@unknownuser said:

You can buy a card w/ uber framerates and clockspeeds that'll make you dizzy

The usual card tests found in magazines etc are rather useless for choosing a card to use with SU, as they seldom test OpenGL performance. Magazine editors are almost exclusively interested in DirectX performance, that is irrelevant to SU and mostly applies to games.

I add one warning to notebook buyers. Driver upgrades to notebook graphics are almost exclusively available only through the notebook manufacturers, and most often than not the upgrades are few and long between. I was lucky in that the driver shipped with my Nvidia-equipped Acer luggable runs SU OK, as there has been no upgrade to that at all in four years. If you can, choose a graphics subsystem supported directly by the graphics manufacturer.

Anssi

Edson,

Thanks for the explanation, and for another great image.

Anssi

I like these too. Only, in the first one the lines in the building might be better if thinner, and the repetition of identical and identically coloured realistic cars would make me fear that the Greys (or some other threatening beings) have silently invaded the city.

Anssi

Mirjman,

The first image is otherwise very good and communicates the mood very well, but I would get away with the "smudges" in front of the main entrance, IMO the fading effect should start from somewhere just to the right of the first tree, leaving the entrance area with its natural deepish shadows.

Thanks for giving the insight to your technique

Anssi

Good calm architecture and renders very suitable for presenting it. What slightly disturbs me is that the atrium clearly (to judge by the shadows) has a very large glass roof which is its most prominent feature, yet looking up, it is nowhere to be seen.

Anssi

@ridix said:

With large models, wont painting both sides of surface slow the display? After all you end up with twice the painted surface SU need to process.

Ridix,

It depends much on your hardware setup. If you have a decent graphics card and your OpenGL hardware acceleration works, adding textures does not slow down SU much. Adding geometry (edges, faces) makes SU sluggish much earlier. Somewhere here (or in the old forum) is a test file by Alan Fraser with about 1000 trees that are simple PNG images, and the model orbits and zooms beautifully even on my old ATI 9200 card. 3D trees even without textures would maybe make my computer burn...

Anssi