Happy Birthday Boofredlay/Eric

That is thanks to you, it's one of your Toruses/Tori/torum.

Does he use one of those tight fitting rubbery cases for his zip antenna, and if so does he find the textured ones provide greater sensitivity in his reception?

The plant term brings back many childhood memories for me.
In Australia we also call diggers, road construction vehicles, things of that sort "Plant" and often "Heavy Plant".

So you can imagine a kid sitting in the back of the car being driven through the countryside seeing a sign saying

................. Dad Dad, don't go this way there are Triffids!!!!

It's a wonderful plug-in, ten minutes to whip up this.

I think he is producing something seriously 3Dimensional.

VLC http://www.videolan.org/ is another very good free player, plays nearly every format.

Jean, thanks for the suggestions, I had looked at it that way already but I'm really wanting to be able to work with one file. The size may be prohibitive but I'll get to that eventually.

Chris, Namesets looks very good, I've had a little play with it with my morning coffee. I'll delve into it further later and I'm sure I will have some questions for you.

I'm wondering if it is possible to create a "scene tree" (for want of a better term).

What I mean by that is, for example,

You have a 10 story building, 10 scene tabs to go to each floor.

But each floor has 10 rooms, so 10 more scenes tabs of the rooms on each floor.

Then perhaps 4 scenes of the room.

I'm looking for a quick way for a Non user to navigate a complex structure using an obvious hierarchy. They know they want to look at the picture on the north wall of room 6 on floor 8, so click floor 8 tab, it opens floor 8 with the room tabs, click room 6 tab, it opens room 6 with 4 tabs, you get the idea.

Thanks for that Scott, it certainly helps get my head around it a little better.

I've not done any rendering yet but what I see astounds me.

My wish would be that people post an image of the model as well so you can see a bit of where the render came from.

Create your circle then type 50s and enter, or whatever number you want, S stands for sides [segments].

First thing that springs to mind for me, use a sphere and a cylinder and intersect with the wall, then remove the bits you don't need.

Thanks rclub24, that looks very interesting.

I'm downloading the trial now to give it a whirl.

I know there is the sketchup viewer which you can get people to download and install, but is there a way to make a self viewable file?

I'm thinking an emailable version for smaller stuff and something on a CD for larger projects.

Eventually I would like to produce a model of a cruise ship and be able to tour through it without having to install any software.

Thanks Gaieus, I replied with the results in that thread, it is pretty slow, but I works for onsite and simple presentation purposes.

Mike, I will probably end up with one in the nearish future, mainly for other work uses, I'll update how well it works then.

For reference I just tested my Asus Eeepc running XP and SU7.1.

The test shows it is pretty slow but it all works if you want something portable..

I've opened two very high poly models, and they certainly orbit and zoom quite happily, I imagine any work on them would take forever though.

I was curious so I installed SU7 on my older netbook, it runs perfectly.

Could someone suggest a model I could download that would "test" it's abilities.

I agree, that's why I said not for major use.

I think the iPad would have some serious limitations too.

Asus already have a Tablet PC available that can do this. It's the Asus Eee PC T91. The screen flips around and folds back down onto the keyboard. It has multi touch with palm rejection.
It runs Windows 7 and has 2 Gig of RAM so should manage sketchup fairly well.

I'm not suggesting it for major jobs, but certainly for quick onsite drawings and presentation and such it would be ideal.

And it's a normal laptop as well, without being locked into the Apple world if you don't want to be.