@jason_maranto said:

That lame argument would hold water if it were not for the massive number of plugins developed to take SketchUp well beyond "simple and small"

How many of that "massive number of plugins" are truly beneficial. I bet there are very few that a user will run on a daily basis. Many will be a niche solution for those doing repetative tasks and some for the lazy who haven't grabbed the core program. There are a few shining lights and they are the ones which advance the capabilities of SU by processing complex maths to provide the right solution such as Fredo's bezier plug. Hopefully some of these better examples will be incorporated into the core now we have Trimble commited to developemnt but SU doesn't require pages of buttons for every possible task to be efficient.

On a hard commercial footing the free version is just an open ended trial. It needs to be sweet enough to convince users that it is worth the upgrade to the Pro version. If the user doesn't like the program or walks because he has seen something more suitable then it isn't really a problem for Trimble they didn't make any money from the user anyway. Google's business model was very different, get used to the idea that SU will no longer be subsidised by advertising revenues and Trimble will need to make a profit. If you are making money out of the free version maybe it's payback time if you want SU to survive.

I had trouble with the link too. Just pop over to youtube and do a search for "nick sonder architect" they should all be listed.

@unknownuser said:

I hope they are helpful.

Nicely presented Nick and clears up our earlier exchange about line work. You have certainly grabbed SU, made it work and provided solid evidence that SU is not just a toy!

Not sure if this is an appropriate option for what you want to achieve but you could save the file with the scene(s) you want without any model as a "template" and then import the model.

Hi Neil I've got an Archicad licence. Great piece of software if you do repeat style projects and don't want to do anything that isn't in the box. I'm migrating to SU as I think it is much more focussed as a design tool. Ok it needs development of the many well discussed shortfalls but fingers crossed we should see some great progress soon.

I take the line SU is for the 3D modelling bit and LO is for the 2D graphics and notes. Have you looked at the scrapbook facility? That is where you would start to save time if you have an office standard.

Yes I was referring to batch printing. It may be one to add to the wishlist but I personally feel there are much more basic issues to be worked on in LO that may take at least a couple of upgrades before advanced printing was considered, but SU is "under new management" so we'll just have to wait and see on progress...

Can't be done as far as I'm aware. I can't say I'm disappointed as it's a nightmare (wasteful) if you need to print the file and the sheets are random. The work around would be to send the exported PDF's to a PDF printer where they can be compiled into a single file.

Have you checked out the latest FREE Adobe Reader X1?

Good suggestion Dave, it's been bugging me recently that I can't seem to get enough differentiation between lines & profiles.

I've fingers crossed on LO 2013 improving some of these presentation niceties as I don't fancy doing that for every drawing in my project details.

I would agree with Mental but if the high priority scene is transparent then you will still see parts of the lower priority scene. Are you working with two different SU models? If so you might want to consider what Tig suggested but in a single SU model and save the required scenes in SU for import to layout.

For refurb work you do only need three control layers of existing, demolition and proposed. With these you can switch happily between them in layout if you need to trace or change linetypes.

Awesome!!! I initially thought they were post construction. Hope the finished project looks as good.

Chris, your problem appears to be the dimensions of the parts in your model would be too small for SU to compute. I know, it's a long standing issue. The usual cure is to scale up the model to carry out the operations and then downsize to the original once you've done the necessary.

For colour lines try the attached styles

Solid colour by layer

Edge colour by layer

Welcome to the machine - RIP Star Wars

Just noticed on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/windows XP support will be dropped from 8 April 2014

I made the mistake of moving to Vista worst thing I ever did. I was a big fan of XP but I couldn't get back there so when Win7 arrived with favourable reviews I grabbed it. Suddenly everything worked again. But to get back ontrack and answer your question I'm running SU8 Pro on Win7 (32bit) with 2Gb of ram quite happily.

I believe some of the admin overheads are less with XP but in terms of staying within the realms of supported platforms moving to Win7 wouldn't be a bad move as I would imagine with Win8 coming over the horizon quickly XP may be served notice of dropped support quite soon.

You might like to read this thread for further ideas...

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=20759

The outliner / layers debate has been going for a while. It depends which fits your need best. Me, I use both as I find the layers can simplify locating things in the outliner, but it does have it's own filter.

On PC if you go through the SU menu you can only have the one instance. If you go to the SU launch icon or an SKP file in windoze explorer (not IE!) you can as described above open a second copy of SU alongside the first.