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Pichuneke,
Are the colours in your model intentional?
If not, you are having a lot of back sides of faces showing. It is not a great issue in SketchUp, but sooner or later you will want to render your model in an external application, and they will cause all kinds of problems, especially with materials.
You can use the Reverse Faces and Orient Faces commands in the right-click menu to do the corrections.
Happy Sketchupping,
Anssi
It seems to work as it should now - I am downloading it at the moment. For me it showed the "download now" and "remind me later" buttons as it should.
But there should be the option of turning upgrade notifications off in Preferences. At work users have limited rights, and upgrades must be done by the IT staff, so the notifications only serve to confuse users.
Anssi
Edson,
The full choreography depends on the rendering application used and the exporter or intermediate file format used. So for starters:
check your model for reversed faces and correct where necessary. Preferably back faces should not be visible anywhere. An exception is glass in window panes and such, many renderers have a "thin glass" or equivalent material that works on single surface objects
paint your model with the materials you intend to use. Apply paint only directly to faces. Few renderers recognize materials applied to groups or components. If you intend to use the renderer's native materials, you can use for instance simple colours as placeholders. Alternatively you can use the color by layer method (not to my liking)
some exporters require to avoid too deep component /group nesting. Explode if necessary
Anssi
And here is the "final" file:
testi2.pdf
Anssi
@goggin said:
But then I figured out what the problem is. I have to use 2D export to get the .pdf option, and in that case it only exports what's visible on the screen. In order for me to get the whole floorplan on the screen, I have to make it much smaller. In that case, you don't get individual lines-- it's like you did a screen capture, and you lose all the detail.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if you can't export to Acrobat at scale, and at 24x36 paper size, then it's not much use in a real-world situation, because that's what's you're going to have to give to builders and city planning depts., etc. I have to believe that this has been worked out, and that I am missing something.
Yes, you are missing something. The point of the profile settings is that the "match screen" setting does literally that: the profile line thickness is set in proportion of the screen display, so in your case, if you magnify the plan to four feet wide, the profile thicknesses will follow suit. So you must just untick the "match screen" setting, and decide yourself how wide you want your lines to be. Attached is the setting you probably used
and the PDF you probably got
testi1.pdf
Then my new settings, with all lines at .25 mm thickness
And the result-see next post, it seems to limit to 3 attachments
Anssi
I had no problem exporting. This is what my Export dialog looked like
And this is the PDF I got:
testi.pdf
Cheers
Anssi
Sorry, my bad memory. Of course I meant the Profile lines box(and Section Lines, too)
I cannot say right away what the problem is now. I remember once getting the same result, but not what caused it. Let's think about it...
Well-you say you adjust the page size to get the right scale. For me it works the other way round. I set the scale, and the page size adjusts itself (as I tab out of the scale box). I never touch the page size settings unless I want output that is not to scale.
Can you attach your skp file?
Anssi
You have some funny large value set in the Profile width box. Setting it to Match Screen display is usually enough
Please don't use the BMP format for image attachments, the file sizes are enormous and they take ages to load
Anssi
SU gives you weird horizontal camera angles if you resize the SU window to an elongated horizontal rectangle. The SU camera angles are calculated vertically, so they are not directly equivalent to 35 mm cameras, where the angle is determined diagonally across the image. So on a normal screen, the horizontal camera angle is bigger than the value you type into the VCB box.
Anssi
Hi,
Usually this happens when the face you are windowizing has more than 4 edges.
Anssi
Granted, but you start to like it
I wish my dream of last night was true.
Anssi
This is interesting. I'll have a try with FileMaker Pro. I can make it calculate nice squares or even cubes out of the required area data. I'm all for using a text file format like CSV, it can be written in many ways, in emergency even by hand with Notepad.
Anssi
I am not sure, but isn't SU suposeed to only support DWG formats of ACAD 2004 or older?
Anssi
@larry bates said:
So, are you saying that because I didn't make the scan of the floor plan a separate layer that the lines were becoming part of it?
Hi Larry,
Layers in SU do NOT separate geometry, they are just one way of controlling the visibility of objects. So to keep your lines separate from the scanned photo, you should group it. Grouping or componentizing are the only ways to keep pieces of geometry separate in SU.
As to using layers, it is a good practice to draw everything on layer 0, and if you need to use layers, make groups or components of the geometry before moving it to another layer.
Anssi
Seedouble,
How edges and profiles look is controlled in the Edge settings pane of the Styles/Edit dialog. To get different edge colours, you have to have "By Material" as the Color setting, and All the Same is best when you want them uniform. This setting, as all the settings here, apply to your whole model.
So if your edges look translucent, you must have painted them with a translucent colour, perhaps together with the faces. To paint the edges independently of the faces, the best method is to do it in Wireframe view.
In SU, it is also possible to apply a material to a whole group or component instance. Painting a group or component instance affects all those entities within it that are of the Default material.
Anssi
Compared to mine your models are quite big. If you use a lot of components, especially 3D trees and such, the actual face and edge count the computer has to handle may be huge.
As the edges and faces are mostly handled by the CPU, your problem might not be with the graphics card, but with the processor speed. A dual-core Pentium is essentially two P IV processors on the same chip (with some enhancements). SU is not multithreaded, and it uses only one of these processors at a time, so the performance you can expect is only slightly better than from a 2 GHz Pentium IV of 3-4 years ago.
Anssi
Hi all.
The funny thing that now comes to my mind is that none of my clients have ever asked me about the tools that I use. With them the conversation is most often about matters relating to the design. Even the HVAC consultants using their new 3D tools are often very happy to use my simple 3D surface models to check their things without asking how I made them.
Anssi
Thomthom,
Perhaps you are overdoing it. Sounds like an enormous model. The boards alone would create 27000 faces and 54000 edges. I would recommend using a suitable texture.
Then there is the thing about randomness. Do you really want it, the real thing? We architects usually strive for a result that "looks" random, and relatively few of the possible random arrangements actually do. That is why it is best done by eye. I don't think that apparent randomness can be mathematically defined.
Anssi
In fact the free version CAN be used commercially, the agreement wording has changed from v.5.
The main difference between the versions is that Pro has Layout and vector-based output formats (DWG, DXF, PDF, 3DS, OBJ...)
Anssi
Some CAD programs such as ArchiCad have some workgroup features, but even they don't let two users work at the same part of the same file simultaneously.
Anssi