@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:
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.
@slbaumgartner said:
Yes, I see the same issue with the file you uploaded. For whatever they are worth, some random observations:
Though the trees are "face me" they really don't look like they are flat to the viewport. Their bounding boxes certainly aren't. Also, the bounding boxes are quite large compared to the tree, as if there is some hidden or minuscule geometry in there somewhere, though I can't find any.
They are nested inside components, so I tried exploding the components. That reduced the bounding boxes to a tight 2D fit, but still they aren't oriented flat to the viewport and still if you find a malignant viewpoint they will tumble.
While they are undergoing weird gymnastics, I can't select any of the offending trees by clicking on their current view location, but they select if I click in open air where they would be if upright. After I exploded the components, if I click on a rotated tree, it immediately snaps back upright!
The effect is quite sensitive to exactly where you orbit, almost as if there is a "gimbal lock" sort of singularity affecting the transformations that only happens at certain view directions.
All this makes me suspect there really is a nasty corner-case bug in how the transformations for face-me components are managed.
1 I think that the reason why a bounding box of the simple component is bigger than you'd expect probably has to do something with anticipation of rotation of the face-me tree which is inside.
2 I also noticed that thing with clicking the air where the upright tree should be but it isn't when starts its gymnastics. Curious, isn't it?
3 slbaumgartner, have you checked why shadows of some faces are not cast though they should?
@tig said:
Why is the model origin so far off ?
Large distances can cause issues...
I'm modelling a part of the town, and as I said the site is pretty big so wherever you put the origin some parts of the site will be distant from it.
I'm not modeling everything in the same file but I'm modelling parts of the site in smaller files so now it's not even convinient for me at this stage to change the origin of the main file since I don't need some mess with 'Paste in Place' command.
Anyway, I'd like to hear does anyone else have the same problem with the file I uploaded.
And also what causes missing shadows from some faces of the trees...
@tig said:
Where are your model axes ?
Are your face-me components' axes equivalent ??
The site is 1500x600m big so the origin of the model is pretty distant from those trees, more than a kilometre. You can see it yourself if you download the SU file from my previous post. But that is how it is, that cannot be changed.
As for how axes of the face-me component relate to the axes of the containing component this can be seen on the GIF image below.
Noooooooo!!!
It started again... 
Why on Earth this is happening?
Looks like a punishment cos I've been avoiding the gym for the last two months. 
@slbaumgartner said:
I can't find the reference right now, but I recall seeing another post in which it was explained that if you nest a face-me component inside another component, when you orbit the "anchor" point of the face-me moves per its position in the enclosing while the face-me rotates to stay facing. This produces some strange-looking motion.
If I understood you correctly I can say that this is why I paid attention that the origin of the face-me component is on the trunk of the tree and close to the origin of the containing component as I realized that otherwise my face-me trees are moving about too much when I orbit the model. And also I have blue axes in the same dirrection but other two are pointed differently.
Anyway, I think that what made those trees behave so weird is something else. HornOxx said he cannot reproduce or simulate this behaviour. Now with my new mouse I cannot reproduce it neither.
TOPIC A
1 I don't have that small model anymore. It was a temporary model which I deleted after making those png files.
2 Yesterday and today I had a lot of problem with my mouse - the cursor used to freeze frequently so I replaced it two hours ago with another mouse. Then I opened my big files with a bunch of problematic trees in order to pick some and place into another temporary file to share on this website but none of theese trees acted disobediently anymore! I checked and checked...now they rotate normally.
It appears that my old mouse caused the problem to the graphic card (if that is possible after all) which resulted in that strange face-me behaviour. That's one guessing...
3 However I put some trees to the file called "Trees - Missing Shadows" so that you can check why some shadows are missing which is another issue I'm dealing with.
**TOPIC B**
4 As I said, I have a collection of trees I made myself and what's weird - some faces don't cast shadows at least not on my computer event though 'Cast Shadows' is checked on in all cases.
5 A couple of minutes ago I solved this problem in this way: I used the 'Sample Paint' tool on the face which doesn't cast shadow, then I changed its RGB value for 1, say from 135,128,86 to 134,128,86 and got the shadow from that face! Then I changed RGB to the old value and the shadow remained.
Weird, weird, weird...
6Check yourself please. Download the file "Trees - Missing Shadows".
**TOPIC C**
7 It's been several months since I have this issue: when I open my SU2014 and work on some model I can export the jpg file from it without crashing SU. But if I have several SU2014 files opened in the same time, exporting the image from the first model causes the other SU windows to crash.
Does this happen to anyone else?
**TOPIC D**
8 Sometimes I wish that hidden objects can cast shadows. That feature will enable me to have some transparent object like tree with opacity lower than 70 and its hidden ghost in the same place which casts the shadow instead of the visible one. Now if you have the transparent face it will cast the shadow only with the opacity higher than 70. The only trick known to me to overcome this problem is to use transparent PNG pixels (personaly I use this free software for this purpose: http://www.1x1px.me/# ). This is however too slow method and all the time you need to check the colours and to download those 1x1 png files from the website.
Am I the only one who wish to see this feature in some future SketchUp release?
Hi guys.
What one has to do to avoid this kind of behaviour of face-me components?
1 First I draw a circle and make it a component.
Then I place a face-me component tree inside of it.
I repeat the process for different kind of species.
2 Then I plant them on the terrain, scale them to different ratios and some of them I flip around red or green axis in order to achieve visual diversity of the greenary.
3 I put a face-me tree component inside a simple component so that I can by will hide trees or reload a different tree if I'm not satisfied with the existing one without loosing their position on the ground. But this is just a working technique which doesn't need much explanation.
The thing is:
4 When I orbit around the model some trees display instead of normal face-me behaviour some sort of gymnastics: they rotate vertically.
5 Axes of the face-me tree component and its containing component are not aligned but as far as I know this shouldn't be a problem. Or it is?
6 Anyone to give some advice about this?
To repeat the most important thing, the face me component is inside another component which itself is just a simple componenet with no face-me feature.
I wonder what was the solution after all.
@mike lucey said:
I only learned recently that I can pan by pressing forward my scroll wheel on my Elecom Scope Node mouse.
It might be possible to get one here, Special order anything from Japan.
http://whiterabbitexpress.com/scope-node-mouse-elecom/Mike
I've been using the same mouse for 10.5 years already.
Whenever I have to use someone other's mouse it feels strange...
This Microsoft baby is precise and reliable.
I can't imagine work without shortcuts.
On the other hand, it seems there are people who are real SketchUp masters able to model excellent things in Sketchup by - clicking on tools.
This person needs only three and half hour to model a good looking car, yet he or she doesn't use shortcuts (at least not in this video).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv8gECOxLxY
He or she picks even the 'Select' tool from the toolbar. The 'Line' and 'Move' tool also...
However, this may has been done just for the sake of this video, so that people can see what's happening...