Thanks guys. Yes, I was doing a pickhelper or ray intersection and figuring out the object being clicked on and added it to the global selection. That worked fine, but only allowed selecting one entity at a time. I wanted to switch to select tool so I can use the group selection features that are available in it. Like thomthom suggested, I managed to get that working by backing up the current tool before doing Sketchup.send_action("selectSelectionTool:") and then restoring the older tool on release. This probably won't retain the tool state since I'm actually exiting the tool and re-entering, but it seems to work for my purpose. Thanks again!

Thanks TIG.

If this system is entirely under your control, it would be easy to include all the geometry in the template model. Then when the user opens a new model, all those components are there without any possibility of being undone.

Some times the toolwindows get the focus. Say if you undo a change where you edited a material in the Material Editor - SU will send the focus back to that window. Annoying.

@sdmitch said: Using the BoundingBox certainly works as long as the selection box is not rotated which will cause BoundingBox to be much larger than the selection box. I see no reason why the selection process should be any slower on a curved surface. It should only matter how many total entities there are in the model. Yea. That is the same thing I'm confused about as well. Unless SU has a way of selecting the cylindrical surface as one unit or a collection rather than add each face of the curved surface one after the other(which is what my code does). Also, all my conditionals could be slowing things down as well. The selection box is axis aligned, so the they bounding box and the selection box should pretty much be the same size.

@dan rathbun said: What platform is this for? PC or Mac ? This is for the PC.

Thanks everyone for the replies. @Dan using the draw in a tool's view method looks like a plausible option. Let me dig into it and get back. Thanks again.

Hmm... Thanks Tom! @thomthom said: No API. You might be able to use Win32 under Windows - but I have no idea for OSX.

@sdmitch said: There is always a way but at what cost. The code would no doubt expand from 3 lines to 3000. I'm on a framerate sensitive medium, so anything I can do to improve frame rate would be useful. It would be great if you have any tips on how to set the LOD for the miniature.

@tig said: The text-string affects the result. "V\nE\nR\nT\nI\nC\nA\nL" V E R T I C A L That did it! thank you so much!

Most of the native tool ids are defined as global constants, that begin with "CMD_" List them, at the Ruby Console: Object.constants.grep(/CMD/).sort The tool state integers vary from tool to tool, and some tools do not use them at all.