Lewis , this is great news . I haven't been so successful with sketchup on Ubuntu/xubuntu/mint/debian . It seems to balk on the unable to initialise OpenGl . Says Error ChoosePixelFormat failed . Any clues ? There was a patch for wine at http://aksels.de/software.php which i tried as well . Didn't work .

@lewiswadsworth said:

One of my students told me that is the problem, as well, with the "free" AutoCAD, although I don't know how obnoxious it is.

Quite an irritant . One of the interior designers in one of our project was using a student version . So every time I brought in some geometry from their drawings it used to corrupt our drawings with this tag . There is a nifty little program that helped us out in getting rid of the tag but a headache all the same .

If you want to use ivy generator geometry in Sketchup you better wish you were dead , too many polygons for Skup to handle .

Another program for normal maps

http://www.crazybump.com/

@watkins said:

Possibly one way to do this would be to go into Component Edit Mode (CEM), select the geometry you want to keep, save it to the clip board and then exit CEM. Before doing anything else, go to Edit>Paste in Place. The part saved will appear and will be external to the component. You can then move it away from the component using the move tool.

Does this help?

Regards,
Bob

That is what I have been doing . So I guess I will continue doing the same . Thanks .

I would export the gemetry as 3DS , fire up Blender and before doing anything I would have a look at this fantastic tutorial . It sounds very similar to the scale you are working in

http://yorik.orgfree.com/tutorials/urbandesign-blender.html

Thanks Jean but I think I didn't make myself clear . I know how to edit components. What the refedit function gives in autocad is the ability to choose geometry outside of the block (when you are inside it ) and make it a part of the block and to choose geometry inside the block and take it out of the block , not delete it . My question was if something similar can be/has been implemented in Sketchup .

In Autocad one can easily add and remove entities from a block with the refedit command . Is there a way to do the same in Sketchup ? At the moment I copyclip what I need before editing and paste . To remove I just erase but that way I lose the geometry .So another copyclip ....
Does the job but a bit clumsy .

Excellent tutorial , very similar to how are produce animations except for a twist , I don't use Premiere or After Effects but instead a piece of Free software (GNU GPL) called Mencoder . Using a commandline switch like
"d:\programs\mencoder\mencoder.exe" mf://*.jpg -mf fps=12:type=jpg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=12000 -oac copy -o output.avi -ffourcc XVID

I have compressed about 2500 1200x900 frames to Xvid format in under five minutes . Notice the vbitrate=12000 , Jacking it up really improved the picture quality . You can get Mencoder here .