@pixero said:

Wow.
I use Fredo box stretch frequently but didn't know you could move the scaling "plane".
That makes it even better.
I guess we learn something every day...

You are right.

I didn't know this neither.

That's why I never dared to put "level of SketchUp - ADVANCED".

@kalban said:

So i tested it now with a new template, made from one of SU default templates. Problem still exist.

So i'm guessing next step is to look at extensions, and see if one of them are to blame.

Do that, yes.

Sometimes one has no option other than to manually search for an item which is to blame.

1. Last week for example I experienced a weird behaviour within one file made with some graphics editor program. I made 10-15 files each 50-100 MB heavy (which my computer can work with). But one of them had only about 30 MB and four pages (for printing). Unlike others which could be opened in a few seconds this one always took several minutes. Weird. And when editing one of those pages - I got a terrible slowdown. Just one of those pages.
I couldn't find any solution online.
It looked as that page somehow restricted amount of RAM asigned to the file. Or who knows what.

Anyway, things were settled out this way: I created a fresh file. Made four pages, copied items from problematic file one by one or grouped. And when I started copied items from the problematic page all were copied with no problem except one small jpg image.
Just imagine, 600x400px 100KB image didn't behave nicely, but instead created huge problems and slowed me down considerably.
So instead of copied it from that file, I found it on my computer, imported into the new file, resized it there, placed as it should be and that was it.
Now that file and everything in it behave normally.
No weird acting anymore.

So sometimes even something really small can cause big problems.

2. Or look what happened to me once when working with some face-me trees in SketchUp:

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=63003

During rotation - some trees rotated normally, but some didn't. No one exactly knew why - but eventually, I exploded that tree species component and made a fresh face-me component from exploded parts, put component instances in correct places (luckily I had marks) and now all of them behaved like good guys this time. Exploding and reasembling helped in my case.

3. I hope you will find the guilty guy in your case soon.
And tell us what was it.

Kalban,

Do you see that behaviour in every file you make?
If that is just in one case - then it may be one of those cases which are hardly to explain (happened to me a couple of times in different programs).
(Usually one has to open a new file and redraw a problematic object and so save time thinking whole day what was wrong.)

If that happens in all cases on your computer then I don't know what to say.
I myself didn't experience that weird acting.
But I use SU2016.

Happy New Year to everybody!
All the best in 2020.

Hi driven,

I see there's an old thread about skewing components. Very good.
I made a couple of pretty detailed descriptions (with images included) what I did when creating those components and from them it's obvious I could accidentally make some skewed components (as I had that component inside component story + flipping). The fact that some trees were skewed didn't bother me as trees are in nature skewed anyway, in some sense. I didn't even notice some are skewed. And after all, visually they looked OK. The problem occurred when some trees started to rotate in a weird way.

And what's even more strange is that...now I cannot make them 'dance' by repeating the same process.

One thing from the thread you posted: Chris explained how to create a skewed component by rotating the inner component and scaling non-uniformly the outer one. I remember I used a flipping method (and maybe in one case I flipped the sub-component) as there's no point in rotating a face-me component.
Yet, whatever I do now the trees behave normally.

I replaced ill-behaving tree components with some other trees that used to be OK and then edited them to my liking. I did this manually not by reloading. Now all the trees behave as expected even though some of them are still skewed!

So this is the catch:

1. It's not the distance of the origin of my main model as trees rotating in a weird way do so even when they are a couple of metres distant from the origin which you can see if you import them into a new file.
2. Those ones which used to behave unexpectedly were skewed but not all of my skewed trees behave like that.
3. I cannot produce such behaviour by will nor the others who tried to do so.

That's why I wrote it looks like this will remain some kind of mystery.
I solved the problem by replacing problematic trees with some which are not but I don't know what actually went wrong.
What?
And why?

@mac1 said:

Making assumptions is a basic voliation of general approaches to trouble shooting.

Cheap philosophy is of no help here.
It won't make any serious contribution to this thread.

I simply realized that in your experiment you used the tree type that wasn't problematic at all so what you solved had been already solved.

Well, mac 1,

I'm sure you've realized that when you pick a problematic component and reload its face-me sub-component by replacing it with some other face-me component such are native SU characters...the behaviour remains the same (see the image below).

However if you reload a whole component (like Derrick) instead of "circle+face-me tree" component then there's no silly movements.

This will remain some kind of mystery.

Eventually I had to put new trees manually on the same location, one by one. So far new trees are OK.

What I have done when creating my tree collection and placing it in my model can be seen in the gifs below. This time I made the circles bigger so that one can see them more easily.

![At one point I decide to replace one tree type with some other. I just delete one face-me tree type and insert a new one. Since the "circle + tree" component has been already scaled I don't have to repeat that process. The GIF shows they are properly scaled.](/uploads/imported_attachments/QX8G_Ivedonethis02.gif "At one point I decide to replace one tree type with some other. I just delete one face-me tree type and insert a new one. Since the "circle + tree" component has been already scaled I don't have to repeat that process. The GIF shows they are properly scaled.")

If you look the first GIF file I uploaded you'll see that one face-me tree is acting weird even though it's only a couple of metres distant from the origin of the model (which I deleted). So I think that having the origin distant from the trees cannot be the cause for this behaviour. At least not in this situation.

After all, I think that big distances are not relevant per se, but only in relation to the size of your entities. In the case of my main model (which is big and complex), the distances are big but I don't have microscopic details. Also I didn't have any other problem with it prior creating these face-me trees.
And not only that but it appears that only one specific tree type is from some reason problematic: one of those two linden trees. I made two linden tree types and one of them decided to dance.
My new guess is that this has to do something with the way I scaled those face-me trees or the way I made unique one of the instances of that problematic linden type, which I then copied all around the site and now some of them refuse to behave nicely.

As for the missing shadows...this issue was present on different tree types. I solved it in an unusual way: simply by changing a bit the RGB value of the material applied to the faces which refused to cast shadows. When I changed back to the old RGB value shadows remained. It's enigma to me.

Twillight Zone, yes.