In 8 your toolbar positions are saved. So if your resize your window it will go crazy as usual. But when you return to it's original size there is a command to restore toolbars. LAA means that if your use 64bit OS SU can utilise more ram. So those long number crunching waits are reduced. Not quite sure how much ram but there is an article in our Webmag CatchUp that explains it. It was actually written by Twilight Guru Fletch. Edit It's 4gb on 64bit. Up to 3gb on 32bit but that needs some tweaking to happen.

All four applies for TWR - actually... Although some perhaps will start arguing about "Fast render times", I'd say; it all depends on your scene/model, the materials used, lightning, wether you're using one of the biased or unbiased presets and - of course - how fast your computer is... Others may debate the "Low cost" and we need to acknowledge that although 99,00 USD is a low price to many, the price is high for many people in other parts of the world... My statement is, that compared to other render applications, all of the above points applies for TWR... So... It's impossible to say exactly which one to leave out from the list, since it will depend on the individual person... If I personally had to leave out one, it would be "Fast render times"... To me it's also a little fuzzy... Fast... Compared to what...?? To me it's fast, to others it's Acceptable, while others again may find it slow...

Thanks thomthom - that was it. I 'distort' each incidence of wood texture depending on where it is on the model to make it look correct. I didn't realize doing that would create a separate instance of the texture in the texture file. Live and learn.

Just the texture files when I Export. When I work in SketchUP I create a file that has the model and all of it's textures in it for organizational purposes. The file for this model has 4 wood textures (JPGs). When I Export it as OBJ the file shows the SU model and 77 textures - all instances of the original 4. This shows up in the file folder, not in the Materials panel or anywhere else in SketchUp. But when I open the model in modo I have 77 textures in the Shader Tree and 77 texture polygon groups in the Statistics panel - so the file madness is coming along with the model. I can rebuild this model easily but my curiosity wants to know why this is happening. I can make a simple cube, copy it and distort the 6 faces and get nothing but the original textures when I Export so it has something to do with this particular model. Thanks for your input so far.

Materials can be assigned to groups/components and edges, too, so they are not always that easy to get rid of. ThomThom has a nifty plugin to work with such messy models: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=17587 and he also has one that you can use to quickly replace one material with the other: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=26013 Also it is often an issue that these WH models are compilations of some other WH models (thus the very similar or sometimes same materials with different names). TIG has a plugin that aims to consolidate them: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=33516

When I create new libraries for materials or for styles or components, I just stick them in the Materials, Styles or Components directories so I don't have to go searching for them in other places on my computer.

I'm glad to see I'm not alone with this problem. I tried out the latest version of V-ray, to see what it would make of all the vegetation I do with alpha transparency. The load time for SU increased from around 5 secs (even loading the previous version of V-ray) to nearly a full minute (or so it seemed). Needless to say, I uninstalled it again. Maybe I'll give it another chance with V-Ray Toys installed. I've also noticed that I get error reports generated if I quite SU8 after a V-Ray render...especially if I quite very shortly after. It tells me that SU has stopped working; of course it has...I just closed it.

Yeah, just open the Arch D that has borders and unlock the layer(s) that have the unwanted graphics ('On Every Inside Page' usually) 'Ctrl+A' and 'delete' That work?

Existing customers can login to their customer gateway to get discounted upgrade pricing. I checked and a v1 to v2 upgrade is $277 (US). It's $172 (US) to upgrade node licenses. I think I'd rather have Thea so I'll upgrade only if Spain wins the whole thing. ::It's still less money to buy Thea with 2 node licenses and sketchup plugin::

VfSU does not have tools to modify geometry - you need to use other SketchUp tools for that.

@unknownuser said: I almost answered the ad but then I thought: "Go find the old smudge powder, triangles, Mayline, rapidographs? Naw, I don't really want to go back to that." nor do I. And I can't. all the room on my desk is taken up by monitors!

@tig said: If it's only a few instances, then there's a simple manual fix... Use a Style showing end-points - so you can see them! Use the Move tool with nothing preselected. Pick the end of the split line and move it to the end of its cousin. You can move a vertex if nothing else is selected - otherwise the Move tool assumes you want to move the selected objects ! You now have one line where there were two... Obviously if there are lots of split lines a script is more efficient... Thank you, TIG.

So many great 3D modelers...so little time

Yes, more or less. In SU Layers are not to separate geometry (groups are to) but only to control visibility. If you put different pieces of raw (i.e. not grouped) geometry on different layers, they might end up conflicting with each other all the time. Just imagine that you decided to unite two groups and move the geometry from one to the other. It's really unpredictable how it will behave. The other thing is that Layer0 is a bit special layer. Although all raw geometry is on there (if you follow the rule), if you turn it off, the geometry is still visible. Lastly, until you feel really safe with working on different layers, I would even recommend not to work on other than Layer0 (always keep that the active layer) and only move things to other layers after grouping and through the entity info box (it's rather small so you can even keep it constantly open). If your file is already a mess, use this plugin by TIG: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=7638 It will move all raw ("loose") geometry either grouped or not onto Layer0

Thanks for the reply. I tried several other models last night and they seem to act as expected so maybe there's something unusual about this one. I work in modo and I like rendering in modo but VRay seems to give everything a very distinctive 'light'. There's a clarity to the light that I haven't been able to achieve with other rendering apps. I'd like to have that as an option so I intend to spend some time exploring VRay. Hard to beat the modo Preview though. Again, thanks for the reply

@arail1 said: Thanks Jeff. 10.5 will still be a good upgrade for him. I have lots of machines at my desk and at home and one of my test machines is a Powerbook G4 laptop running 10.4 Tiger. Sometimes I'll test something on that computer and forget to switch back over to a primary machine! Raw computing power aside, it works fantastically. I think you'll be very happy with Leopard on a PPC G4.

@duanekemp said: Is there an update on this information.... new tools that transforms triangles into a pure quad mesh? ThomThoms plugin 'CleanUp³' is capable of connecting co-planar faces, for a further processing ThomThoms 'SubD' might be worth a look too. There are several tools available which should be able to remesh triangles to quads as e.g. the commercial 'ZBrush' or '3D-Coat' as well as free 'Instant Meshes' or good ol' 'Meshlab'. btw, resurrecting 10 year old threads should be avoided, just post a new thread instead.

Thanks baz - I think somewhere in that long thread is the answer I'm looking for, and this is my starting point (I'm quoting from the thread) - "while on the subject of helping out vray, vray SR1 creates vray materials of all materials in the scene even the materials on lines (multi-coloured from CAD imports) could there also be a script to remove all materials from lines? that way vray wouldnt create any unnecessary materials" Only after reading that comment did I realize that the two offending lines only exist in the original CAD file.

@unknownuser said: Much sympathy here. My must frustrating moment is when I use shift+middle mouse button click to try and pan in AutoCad. That's the command to pan is SU but in AutoCad it's the command to orbit. On a large AutoCad file I end up waiting for 2 minutes + for it to stop thinking before I can correct my mistake. -Brodie been there, done that