Anssi

And especially I would often like to temporarily disable those "from point outside active" inferences.

Anssi

I have little experience of modern Macs, but the default middle button behaviour in my daughter's Imac Mighty Mouse was to bring up Dashboard. To orbit in SU, I had to change that in the Mouse control panel into button 3 (if I remember right).

Anssi

@theduke said:

I assume that DXF doesn't have any depth info in it, so I thought the resulting shape would be flat.

There is no difference in the contents of a DWG or a DXF file, DXF is only an ASCII version of a binary DWG. So whether there are Z values in your export depends wholly how the DXF exporter of your CAD program is written and configured.

Other reason why the shape won't fill could be that the segments, or one of them, are very small-the SU limit is somewhere near 1 mm. I also think that there may be a limit where the number of segments becomes too large for SU to handle.

One technique I use in cases like this is to draw diagonals across the shape to see if they fill, and if successful then try to erase them. This can also help to isolate the problem parts of the shape.

You could also try to fill the shape with the Sandbox from Contours tool, and erase the resulting zillion diagonals afterwards.

Anssi

Thanks Markus!

I love it too - and have one hanging over our dining table. The opacity in your render looks a bit odd - ours is totally opaque with only the light coming through

Anssi

Looking at the render it seems too that you haven't modelled the way the edge is turned in at the top and bottom-a great way to catch dust and dead flies

Have you tried to download SU again and do a "repair" install?

Anssi

A Pinnacle external USB digital TV tuner had a terrible "media manager" that wanted to overtake my whole computer so I scrapped the whole thing. I would only have wanted to watch some TV occasionally... The software for an ATI All-in-Wonder card in my other computer comes second.

AutoCad 13 was the worst of all AutoCads.

Of all the time reporting, project management, billing etc. systems I have had to use at work over the years, I really cannot determine which has been the worst, but I really hate them all. Microsoft Office is nothing to them

Anssi

When I export a 2D PDF, Adobe Reader shows the image for a short time, and then pops up this error message:

The font 'Tahoma' contains a bad /Bbox

I never use Tahoma and I wonder why it has to be the SU default font instead of Arial or Times

Also, the PDF exporter does not support Nordic umlauted characters

Anssi

When I export this, Adobe Reader shows the image for a short time, and then pops up this error message:

The font 'Tahoma' contains a bad /Bbox

It is the same that has been teasing me with my PDF exports lately, regardless of the fonts I use (I never use Tahoma, I hate it)

If you want to export a vector file similar to the PDF export by using a PDF printer driver, you can check the "Use High-accuracy HLR" box in the Print dialog. I tried with my old Adobe PDF Writer, and I had no problem (except that it doesn't support large paper sizes)

Anssi

I'm dumbfounded!

Anssi

I have Adobe Reader 8.1.1, and it is yhe same with me, when I open it it displays OK, but if I try to scroll or zoom the image disappears

Is it a font problem?

I have recently had some error messages when opening SU-exported PDFs with Adobe PDF 7 Professional too-they had something to do with fonts, even if the text should have been plain Arial

Anssi

For Google recommendations see
http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=36208

I think the practical bare minimum configuration would be something like:

• any Pentium 4 processor or higher
• 1 GB RAM
• a dedicated video card (preferably GeForce, although ATI works for many too)with the amount of memory that is enough for your screen - I am quite happy with 64 Mb
• a 3-button mouse with a scroll wheel

Your machine could perhaps be quite OK with more memory and a decent graphics card

Anssi

@bayer said:

Annsi - correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think AutoCad 2008 LT has express tools, hence I cannot use flatten as an option. I am sorry if this is inconvenience but I am new to both Autocad 2008lt and the free verson of sketchup 6 and still trying to understand them both. Please let me know what you would do, and if it will require me to download or pruchase any additional tools, left out in the 08 lt version. Thanks agaun for all your time and consideration.

Bayer

From AutoCad or AutoCad LT you can also use the DXB method:

• configure a DXB plotter
• plot to DXB file
• use the DXBIN command to import the DXB file
• scale the import and save as DWG

See also:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2876115&linkID=9240617

Anssi

@unknownuser said:

This is a picture of one of the tornado's that hit Pisgah Alabama, 42 miles from my house.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/floridatornado.asp

Anssi

I have not seen so much spam at the Groups, and what has been seems to have disappeared quite fast enough. So someone somewhere must be monitoring...

Anssi

In Finland: generally no. Consumer law says that the quoted price is what you have to pay. In restaurants you may tip if you feel that you have received extraordinary service. But generally nobody minds if you don't.

Anssi

Bayer,

The trick is an old one but yes, it works only with the Pro version, as the Free one doesn't have DWG export. Of course, if you have access to AutoCad, the flattening can be done there. The Flatten command is part of the Express tools that is included in the AutoCad distribution, you don't have to purchase it separately. It's command line only, so it is not included in menus. Free lisp versions of the command can be found from many locations on the Internet too, if your version happens to miss the command.

Anssi

I too feel that the model building capabilities of SU are superior to all the heavyweight competitors. If we forget about documenting etc. and keep to modelling only, I think that SU would only need the Fat Faces feature and some kind of tagging system (to differentiate between wall types etc.) to function as a basic BIM system. That would allow for very clean exports to IFC or the native formats of BIM packages to finish the design. I don't think that SU should provide all the intricacies of a full BIM program, but allow designers to do all their modeling inside it and provide clean translators into other applications. Nowadays the translators provided are too much of a hassle. Cleaning up a SU model transferred into Archicad takes more time than building it in Archicad from scratch, even if the SU model is built with transfer to Archicad in mind.

Anssi

I hadn't noticed before, but it seems to be true.

The reason seems to be in the way the offset function works. Arcs are just open curves with all the segments the same length, and with all the vertices being on the same arc. When you offset it, this no longer applies. The offset command makes the end segments relatively shorter, and a line drawn between the endpoint of the original and offsetted curve is at 90 degrees to the first segments, and does not cross the centerpont of the original arc. It is more noticeable if you make an arc of very few segments.

Anssi

The easiest way to get the registration information right is to open the registration e-mail you got from Google, copy the entire text, and paste it into the registration dialog box. SU is able to parse the text and extract the info from there, at least on a PC.

Anssi