Thanks Chris. I have a lot of plug ins, though many I don't use, so this will give me a chance to clean up my plug ins. This is the last bit of information I needed to decide to upgrade to 8. Again, thanks.

@bryan k said: @olishea said: Bryan K: you may want to use a depth render to fake underwater effects...you can use it as a mask in photoshop...let the image fade into blue for mirkier water. why not try adding a water texture above and use sun for lighting so it casts caustics onto the rover.....just a thought. Thanks Olishea. Some good ideas. However, I'm using the basic free version of Shaderlight. Not a lot of controls. Not sure how to do the Photoshop effect. I get what you mean, but I don't know how to do it. Tried the texture above. It didn't look good. I did darken the light though. [attachment=0:3rdhj1zz]<!-- ia0 -->subseaROVrenderlights2.jpg<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:3rdhj1zz] Everybody is jumping on the submarine bandwagon this month. http://liam887.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/submarine-model/ I also tried to get the reflection water texture on the sub but I could not get t to work correctly and that was disappointing. Its always annoying when you know exactly what you want to do but just cant get it to work! If you figure it out or get a good effect post it here will be nice to try it myself.

Last one for now. Added another object for scale and some reflection. [image: A8h0_woodentrainrenderB.jpg]

Strangely SU with Windows 7 saves skb's, I have had this issue for a while also. So I zip the .skb it saves and upload it.

guys, i'm officially addicted to following the contest. for those that are unfamiliar with it, Jovoto is an excellent platform and there is a lot of competitions going on simultaneously. plus, it's a good place to show some love to fellow sketchuppers

Nice Bryan,these little Subs are great fun to swim around with in Virtual sailor,Is it Complete?

Ah! Thanks! Yes, I've seen those on many other boats. For some reason it was not on the plans of this one and I did not see any other references, but I would now bet it was just left off of the plans for brevity and the assumption by the designer that anyone would know that one should be there. No problem. Easily added.

@mitcorb said: I am guessing you would want to work on that crisp shadow cast by the building onto the "distant trees". Edit. I can't say I would do any better, however. The backdrop trees are just a photo on a "flat". They really should be replaced by modeled trees or something else if anyone has suggestions? The foreground trees were made with RpTreemaker in SketchUp. I'm still getting the hang of that plug-in. Yeah, the sky isn't what I wanted and the shadows are "off" as well. But hey, I'll get the hang of it eventually. My current priority is still mastering SketchUp itself.

[image: a1tW_garapt2010sidexray.jpg]

@mike lucey said: Hi Brian, Thanks for the contribution although I'd imagine you would not be encouraged to make further selfless contributions if the bad manners of some of the down loaders are anything to go by! It only takes a second to say thanks. Mike I get enough good advice, help and encouragement from here that I don't worry about it... although I don't post my better models native files. But I feel I should give a little back every now and then, right?

Downloaded! Thank eco, really helpful and nice ivan

Perfect! Thanks Bryan.

Updated. [flash=640,385:3ujq56ao]http://www.youtube.com/v/BkODJhFDxxk&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1 http://www.youtube.com/v/BkODJhFDxxk&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1[/flash:3ujq56ao]

@unknownuser said: Cool for this old challenge Great link! But if by speed they meant "days" instead of minutes, then I would have had a shot.

Thanks.

I've never heard of them, but a quick search shows they have an office not far from me here in Houston. What a strange coincidence!

Ah, the Houston area. Thanks.

Thanks flipya. Render? Hmm. No, I hadn't thought about it. I'll probably continue to improve my modeling skills before I start rendering things. I want to work in this field (3D modeling) and I feel I need to be as versatile and efficient as possible before I say "sure, I can do that." So my plan is to first master modeling, then rendering. That way, I'll have a bunch of stuff to render, right? Thanks rclub24!

@honoluludesktop said: Here is an explanation, and "partial" solution. Thomas, When UAC off and as administrator, have you ever experienced a program having problems saving files? Nope.