Here I am (teacher), sitting in a meeting about teaching English and I had a thought (but I don't know if this is the forum where this belongs).

I thought that it would be wonderful to have sketchup buildings that children could "walk" through and then have to talk to each other about what they see or would do; buildings perhaps like a doctor's office, a grocery or department store, a park, a home, you get the idea. Do you think anyone here would be interested in making something like this? or interested in helping me find buildings already made that might work? We're looking for building that would have rooms with lots of stuff in them to talk about.

What do you think? Any other ideas?

Thank you both very much. It took me a long time, but I learned a lot of the basic things (the hard way).

@remus said:

-Image hosting costs a lot of money. To tackle this, try and keep your images small (in terms of file size.) At the resolutions most images are displayed here THERE IS NO NEED TO HAVE A 1MB IMAGE. 250kb or less will suffice for 95% of the images on this site. so to conclude this mini rant, small image files = SCF love, large image files = SCF hate.

Maybe everyone already knows this, but just in case, let me share this little tip. If you already have Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (though I'm sure there are others) there is a special "save for web" for making pics web ready. It will let you reduce the resolution (and size) while watching what happens to the image so you don't lose viewability. (I have to save them with "web" on the end of the name so I don't think I need to do it again later)

So as far as "hideness" goes, they are the same, both are hidden lines, but a softened line is both hidden and "rounded over."

Thank you

Just a simple chicken tractor for four bantams that can be slid across the lawn. It is one of my earliest Sketchup attempts where I learned about all kinds of things that don't work (laughs). Had I known about "hide" then, things would have been so much easier. There is nothing fancy or tricky here, and I don't even have a clue about rendering. It was just a model to show other poultry fanciers how they might build one. The top isn't really clear, that was just to show the nest box, perch, and wire shelf for the feed inside.

bangs head on desk

View Hidden Geometry! Sheesh! I've been using it like crazy to see the lines I'd softened on the curves, I can't understand why I didn't think of that! feels a little stupid right now, then considers chalking it up to low blood sugar

Turns out that I really had hidden them, (not just softened them) because I needed to select "unhide" when I right-clicked* on them once they were revealed. But it worked, of course, and all is well, with no seams anywhere else. does the happy dance

I didn't know about using the eraser tool to soften the lines. I had been right-clicking and selecting "soften." But being able to soften as easily as erase a group of lines is going to be great!

So, I've learned:

1. view hidden geometry (again)
2. make unique
3. use option-eraser to soften multiple lines

Now I'm curious. The outward appearance between hidden and soften lines seems to be the same (except where two components are joined because softening the edges didn't work for that for me), so what is the difference as far as SU goes in how it deals with hidden and softened lines? Is there a reason I shouldn't just hide all those lines I don't want on my curves instead of just softening them?

Many thanks!

*Getting addicted to a real-time strategy game on the computer immediately brings home the need for a two- or three-button mouse for the Mac.

I've been so happy since I've found this place and have learned just enough now to get myself into trouble.

Here is the background situation:

I am trying to work out the way I want to stack some moulding. The Push/Pull and FollowMe have been wonderful in this. However, there was one piece which has beads on it so to save myself having to make millions of beads, I made a piece of moulding 1' long, made it a component, replicated it, and attached it all together into one long piece.

Rats, the seams all showed...

So I hid all the edges on both ends, and poof! no more seams. Perfect! And I made that a component as well.

But now I have a bit of a problem. On the edge of my model, I want to be able to see the contour of each piece, but because the edges of the piece with the beads are all hidden, I can't see the outline for that one. I tried editing the component and then editing the last component of the series inside that one, but I couldn't find a way to make the edges reappear.

So, I have two questions here:

1. Is it possible to unhide those hidden edges?

2. If I manage to do that, will it then effect all of the other copies of that component that make up the larger component and therefore give me back all the seams? Will making that one piece "unique" keep that from happening?

Thank you for your time and patience.
BantyMom

@gaieus said:

Hi Bantymom and glad you could make it through your email issues.

These sound interesting (especially the villa )

Welcome to the forums!

Yes, thank you very much for helping with that.

The villa is very hard, but I'm not in a hurry. I'm enjoying it. The hardest part was finding a large enough picture of the sketch of the site. I have the Getty museum version, of course, but I doubt it was made to be correct. Not that I have the knowledge to make it correct either, but I'm only doing it for fun. I think it must have been beautiful.

Hello,

I'm a very basic user of SketchUp. The only tricky thing I can do is sometimes get "Follow me" to work which I learned when I wanted to model a heated towel bar with curved metal tubes. I was so proud of myself!. I love SU! I modeled up the tile layout of my bathroom which saved me from all manner of misunderstandings with the tile guys! I have laid out poultry pens (I raise show chickens) and have been slowly working on a model of the Vila of Papyri (very slowly). Currently, I am trying out various profiles of crown moulding for the same bathroom as the tile.