you need to practice with a good tutorial. You can use youtube to learn uv mapping for free.

Great! I'll store all these options in my notebook for future reference. Bill

@bsquared18 said: Is there a way to copy a component axis from one component to another? I'm not sure if i understand what you want, but to copy the axes you could copy/paste the component with the correct axes or make a dummy component and copy the geometry of the wrong oriented components into the new one (cut+paste - and after making it unique). Or copy a group instead of the component and turn it into a component later, if you need it. The size of the component axes can't be changed i think.

TIG has a great OBJ importer. http://sketchucation.com/plugin/733-obj_importer

Thank you. How did I get nine foot long images? Well, I started with nine foot long boards.

Thanks, JGB, for reminding me of Curviloft. I've used it for other things but not this. It worked great. Your second solution was beyond my current skill level. Bill

As Chris said purge before each saving it can decrease by ten (not always) the file size.

A lot of time has passed since I started this thread. As an update, I want to mention that the latest version of Jonathan's (aka "Marginal") SU2XP plugin for SketchUp now does an excellent job of animating SketchUp models to make rotations, movements (translations), smoke, lights, etc. It is doing everything I want it to do so far. Bill

delete the scripts mentioned in the window and try to install these seperate to find out whats going on. Take a look if glass-tools.rb is in the correct folder. The other I dont know what it is.

Thanks, Mitcorb. That's helpful information. Meanwhile, after my last post I did some exploring and found out that I can edit the X-Plane object file in a text program such as Notepad so that the surface of the object is shiny. I tried it, and by golly it works! But I'll keep your info in mind for future reference when and if I have a need to use a rendering program. By the way, I chose to look into Kerkythea because, being of Scot ancestry, I'm naturally attracted to free programs. However, my impression is that there's a long and steep learning curve with that program. Have a great day, Bill

Look below the message window when you're typing. There's a tab labelled Upload attachment. Click on that, select the file and hit the "Add the file" button.

The size issue is good to keep in mind. Bill

How about using Fredo´s Box Tapering instead (FredoScale - http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=17948)?

No problem. And post your progress

Can't say for sure without the model, but it seems like there was just a tiny gap, since tracing over made it close. There are occasions faces will not form and the cause is indiscernible. If you use a setting sometimes for modeling that shows dots at the endpoints, it can be helpful in finding and inspecting or using intersections. It looks like some of your canopy has hidden lines not smoothed, where you see a break in the shading. You should smooth those lines for a better effect. Good job. If you look at posts where wire frame (or hidden geometry) is shown for organic modeling (like cars) you will see examples of how the edges within the smooth forms are laid out (often by plugin, but also by "hand"). The Speed modeling competition always shows wire frames, also the "Artisan" examples.

Thanks for reminding me about all the videos. I had already watched the getting started series but forgot about the others. Bill

thanks. I forgot about these nice SU online tutorial base. Will use it more in future

I would recommend making the rectangle a group and draw on it, and as you input the control points make sure that you watch the tool tips for "on face", because the camera can get confused and you will end up with stuff out in B.F. Egypt to clean up.

When making fairings (among other things, such as access doors) for my airplane models I run into this jaggies frequently. To solve it best, requires the deletion of the faces affected and redraw the interface to suit. Curviloft plugin helps a lot as well.