No. essentially if you only have one instance of a component in your file, it's doing nothing for you in terms of file size. I'll sometimes do that, just to group my objects together but that's about it, just convenience. As for rendering (assuming you're just talking about orbiting around in SU), components do nothing for you there regardless. Your cpu/graphics card still has to look at all the objects on your screen whether they're components or not. The only thing components do for you is help with file size (other than workflow improvements like editing one object rather than 20). Now if you get into actually sending your SU file to an external renderer then it changes things slightly, but that's a different issue. -brodie

What do you mean by more 'efficient' exactly? Both locations are on your hard drive so they're exactly the same. Only difference I can see is that SU knows where to find the ones in your Components folder whereas you'll have to point it to look in another location if they aren't there. Same with textures. Regarding the speed of SU, the only time that the amount of components/textures will affect performance is when you open a components/materials folder that has a lot of stuff in it - ie. it may take a few seconds to load. Other than that, it won't affect your orbiting around a model or the size of the model so long as they only exist in your component/material folders. Once you start putting a component/material in your scene then the file size will increase accordingly. -brodie

@bigtom said: Thanks TIG What is a colorized texture? When you have a 'textured' material [e.g 'brickwork'] in the model materials collection you can edit it. One of the edit options is 'colorize' - this adds a colored 'film' over the texture [you edit the RGB - reset uses the 'average-color' of the texture] so you can tweak your bricks to be 'pinker' or whatever you want...

@dave r said: ....If you change the SKM extension to ZIP, you can get to the image file inside it...... Thanks for that piece of information.

Cool Thom, I did not know you had done that. That sounds great, Chris

I noticed that the offline version of vector magic http://vectormagic.com/home has a dxf export feature, might be useful if you wanted to do a lot of this type of work.

Marcus has a good point but remember to only associate layers with components or groups and leave all geometry on Layer 0. Also, make sure any additional geometry (faces and edges) are drawn on Layer 0 by leaving Layer 0 as the active layer. Chris also has a good suggestion if you need to limit the edges that get softened and the angle between faces isn't a good determinant of which edges get it. I guess I should have mentioned dragging a selection box around geometry you want selected is one way to grab it. Left to right and right to left selection boxes yield different results. Experiment with to see the difference. You can also triple click on an entity to select all connected entities.

I'm taking guess but if your models are generated by a modeller that uses solids these entities may require translation into meshed equivalents which could be producing the additional size/elements.