@unknownuser said:

Specified, quantified products properly attributed with Metadata.

You have my attention

Have you guys looked at what BimUp is offering? Or is there some hard feelings going on here that I'm not aware of?

Rich, what makes you say that PlusSpec is closer to home? I mean, it looks fine but BimUp 5d appears to be offering more

Am looking for people's experience using BimUp 5D: http://www.bimup.co.uk/

If you click on the round reports button on that page there are a number of examples showing dimensions and presentations of models in a way that is not unlike Layout - does BimUp 5D present an alternative to Layout that is as usable as layout?

What are people's experiences with BimUp5D as a Bim tool?

Dave, you have 6pt showing up on your drop down menu or just the default size when you open the doc?

@unknownuser said:

Mate any font can go as small as you want!

Whoa, until you said that I didn't realize that I can just change the font size manually rather than the drop down arrow - excuse my ignorance.

I'm gonna go with 6pt as 8pt seems to be coming out fine in the printer - its just too big for the drawing itself.

The assumption has obviously been made that no-one needs smaller than 8pt so the drop down menu only goes that far but you can just type in '6pt' to force it - shocked that I didn't realize this before

I am beginning to do some quite complicated plans with Layout but am struggling to get a nice looking font that will go small enough. Arial looks nice but even right down at 8points it is not small enough for what I need.

I know there are some other fonts that go smaller but they look awful - does anyone know of a workaround for this or a nice looking font that will go a lot smaller than Arial 8?

@unknownuser said:

Some of these are unusual. I wonder could we see an example of how you used them? Looks like an interesting graphics approach

I use them for mapping industrial sites - example: Red arrows might show how a certain product flows through a factory while blue arrows show a different product.
Have also used in mapping to show emergency escape plans and the like.

They're pretty simple but the first page is uniform and I can just grab em real quick which speeds up my workflow quite a bit

I use arrows for a lot of site diagrams in LO so decided to make a quick reference set of arrows that save me modifying the standard ones which come with LO.

If you're using windows, save the .layout file in

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014\LayOut\Scrapbooks
so you can access it from within Layout.

Remember to go Tools>Folder Options>View and check "show hidden files folders and drives" or you won't be able to find the layout folder to put them in.

Enjoy

Good Arrows.layout

Turns out I'm more deprived than you think - I've never even heard of Contra....

Yep, thats why I pondered whether we're all out of work thanks to a new drawing system - I couldn't imagine a human sitting down to draw all this - how did we figure out how to access it anyway?

@jeff hammond said:

i believe it's a sort of april fools day/gag/easter egg type of deal..
ie- a joke

Its cool, I'm just amazed at the volume - I can barely get around to throwing a water balloon at someone for april fools let alone modeling a TON of arcade games....

So I noticed, but what is the purpose? Thumbs up to the dedicated individual who modeled all the arcade games.....or is that the hook? - that these arcade games are auto generated and we're all about to be out of work

How did you know that and what is this about?

Appears to be working fine for me now. "Terms of use have been updated" is the only 'new' thing I've noticed.

Is it running V.E.R.Y S.L.O.W.L.Y for you too Kris?

"Something hiding in the home page of #3dwarehouse today... Who can find it?"

All I can find is that the 3DWH seems to be running real slow

This is a genuine concern of mine and I hope it doesn't come across as a rant.

I'm probably the least skilled plugin developer there is (because I pay clever people like Dan Rathbun rather than learn ruby myself - see here: http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323%26amp;t=54082), but I'm a bit confused about the direction of SU's plugins.

I would say I'm a pretty proficient SU user but I just tried to get some of my old plugins going and I have to say; what a process.

I love the fact that sketchup's functionality is so diverse because of plugins but the old way seemed so easy - just chuck that bad boy in the plugins folder and you're good to go.

Nowadays, I'm not sure if I should be looking for the appropriate installable plugin in the Extension Warehouse, the plugins directory, or an independent installer (twilight for example).

I understand that we're probably trying to do the unified "appstore" style thing but the ability to understand what was going on in the background (SU is accessing the plugin from XYZ directory) made troubleshooting more obvious than it currently seems...

Is there a thread that clarifies the vision for SU's plugin capability going forward? I'm worried that, if someone like me who is used to sketchup finds the process un-intuitive, people who are learning SU will miss out on one of its most powerful assets because of an abstract usage process.

If you're like me and don't want to buy MS Office and you find that tables aren't copy pasting to Layout very well, you can copy paste them to a notepad document, align the tabs, then copy paste into Layout.
You then just draw some lines in Layout to give it the table look.

Obviously leave this till the end of your project so you don't have to keep manually updating.

A few aren't in the plugin store but I guess it just means that everything will have to run through the plugin store now - thanks for your help.

2.3million faces! Nice work

GPU drivers are up to date but your point about plugins is a valid one - I simply dumped my plugins from the old folder into the new one - will investigate.

Thanks for your suggestions