Yeah speed will get taxed a little but want to keep the textures light in the case of people using large models with many different textures in them (this thread is regarding one texture out of many).

Thats very helpful info and very true regarding printed plans (at least in my experience).

These textures are for marketing the product on the textures itself so that a contractor can download the texture and show it to clients within the sketchup model hopefully encouraging the client to buy the product that the texture represents. Therefore, resolution needs to be reasonably good so it will look attractive within a sketchup model from multiple angles.

@pbacot said:

But can't you change the resolution to use fewer pixels in the end?

Yeah but scaling down results in ugly resolution/textures

Scaling up creates heavy files and lags sketchup
A balancing act as always

Love your enthusiasm Frenchy.

I can't rearrange the individual parts from the configuration in the first image so it looks like I'm just stuck using lots of excess pixels...

Hi All,

Can I pick your brains for a better way to do this?

Am working on a job where I am creating a library of sketchup photo textures that need to tessellate nicely (something like M.C. Escher would make).

These textures don't come in squares but are instead unusual polygons:

I can multiply this pattern many times (as shown by the red outlines below) and then cut a square (green line) where the repeated patterns will tessellate properly:

But that is going to lead to a large .SKM file size once I apply photo textures.

Does anyone know of a way that I can do this using only the unusual polygon pattern shown in the first image without all the other unnecessary pixels?

I can't see a way of doing it using PNG transparencies.

Was playing with a couple of flashforges at a hackerspace yesterday - that was pretty cool.

Thats very helpful - your ability to cut through the fog is much appreciated

Thanks for the feedback, I just downloaded the sample of your book - it looks great. Like many sketchuppers I need to be doing as I learn so will buy it once I actually have a machine to implement my learnings on.

A couple more options within India:

Do you think this is a legitimate Printrbot?: http://tannaeducation.com/products/printrbot-printrbot-simple-kit-2014-model/p/101/#

I can get this Ultimaker brought from NZ - I know it was once a great machine but is it still up to standard nowadays?: http://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=916316839

There are also these rep-raps I can get brought from NZ:

Object moved

(www.trademe.co.nz)

Object moved

(www.trademe.co.nz)

Hi All,

Thank for all your feedback. I nearly bought a printrbot till I found the huge price of getting it into India. Have been looking at local option inztead.

Divide by Zero appear nice but a little pricey for a firzt time buyer

Thought on the folloing optionz appreciated:

http://www.diy-india.com/store/159-pruasi3-acrylic-edition-makers-kit-aka-woodmax-i3-v2.html

301 Moved Permanently

(www.3ding.in)

301 Moved Permanently

(www.3ding.in)

Can you tell hich keyz are broken on my keyboard?

This is great work Nick. Thanks very much.

I've been working my way through a set of mechanical engineering working drawings and have been surprised how few plugins I really need once I get a good process organized.

I recently heard someone referring to the programming language PHP as "messy" and someone replied that PHP isn't messy but is accessible which means that learners can use it fast and as a result can make a mess but once you know how to use it properly you can do amazing things with it (Facebook runs on PHP).

I feel that Sketchup falls into this category - there is a lot of messy stuff done with SU because it is so accessible (which is great because the barrier to entry is so low) but once you really know how to use it you can create attractive, tidy, practical work.

Nick, you have demonstrated this last point to me many times - thanks.

EDIT: Added the first video for to get people started.

Have just been doing some tables from excel to Layout - they copied and pasted quite nicely so long as I didn't try and edit them in Layout - it seems Layout reads them better than it did a few versions back when I tried this and consistently got tabs jumping all over the place.

TL;DR: Try copy pasting from your spreadsheet to Layout first - could save you some time.

Yeah I made a terrific mistake calculating paint area on a construction job because the plugin I used was not behaving the way I expected. I can't remember which plugin it was

What can I say, I'm retro

Aha! Great, thankyou

Select a portion of the material in your model. Right click it and go Area > Material

It will display the area of that material in your current default units.

Just downloaded and installed the latest version of SU (2015.3.331) but can't find a changelog.

Does anyone know what the improvements are?

Yeah you pretty much did say that, sorry. I just didn't click until later

Not right now - but the interface was so easy to use and I was tearing my hair out trying to get anything else to work

Yeah, if anyone else needs a similar solution, this works well but isn't cheap:

http://www.labeljoy.com/

It gets a bit tedious when you've got many models to process with hundreds of different parts in each and individual quantities of those parts well into the thousands...