Just been watching the Olympic men's dowhill. Apparently one team employ a guy who's sole function is to stand behind their skiers at the start and shout encouraging phrases - "You're the man" "Go get'em boy" etc

I can't decide, is that a bit mad ? or just rather sad ?

... if your wife, boss, friend, neighbour has a garmin sat nav

http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/site/us/ontheroad/voicestudio#fragment-1

mmm seems to be tad more expensive than I thought....

Still, delivery is free

I thought this might be of interest to some
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k6IK4nI7RM

don't know what format the 360 stuff is in

It's worth a google on the associated 'fata morgana' for some interesting 'city in the sky' images.

After a fairly major health scare, I'm now .... and there's a problem I'm not a non smoker or an ex smoker, I'm just a smoker who no longer smokes.
Do I miss it ? - Oh yea, I'd go back tomorrow if I could;
Do I feel better (as everyone told me I would)? - not at all, in fact overall I feel slightly worse;
Do I feel fitter - not one bit.

...and probably worst of all I feel that I'm no longer a part that huge informal worldwide club which has brought me so much fun, pleasure and cameraderie over the years.

So good luck everyone enjoy those moments of guilty pleasure while you still can. I'll think of you as I reach for yet another mint.

OK this worked for me
Open SU
Then open Twilight
click on View >> Settings the setting dialogue will appear
Close twilight, the settings dialogue should remain in view, leave it there
Now close SU
Next time you open Twilight your settings dialogue should appear as before

Just a basic Twilight experiment. With a gradient transparency png (XARA fractal clouds) used a sort of vignette within the render - no post - thought the effect was quite nice

Same scene without the png

Balloon model from the warehouse

Just an aside as I see you adding cars to to the Hopper pics

Notice anything familiar in this Ford promo video (39 seconds in)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOJ-pX3v4S4&feature=related

In fact the first few seconds are also, let's just say derivative

Meanwhile in the basement of Sketchup HQ, Bryce decides to bring some festive cheer to the 'guest'

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.

I saw a model, at a degree show, which had the people, trees etc printed onto clear acetate and placed in the model. It seemed to work well particularly for knots of people, hedges etc

I've managed to get molecule images into SU by using Accutrans 3D (Vivaty doesn't read VRML 1 files ) to convert VRML files into 3DS format then importing into SU.

What settings did you use when you rendered these ?
I can't seem to get the bump to work with transparent materials.

My students are going to love this.
Teapot model SU 10 mins - Twightlight 90 seconds

One little trick you can do is to add a face with a gradient transparency png texture overlaying the original face. to create the shadow area.
This is just a quick sketch to show the idea using the texture from above

This is the png

This is a dot dash style I made for a project (Stylebuilder and Xara) . Its not great, but it may work for you.
dotdash.style

Thought I might set my students a Hopper challenge when we return after the holidays. This is a very quick test piece to show them idea - 4 min low render with Twightlight

Trying to capture that sort of 'image glimpsed' quality that some of his painting have

Yes, let's have a Hopper rendering challenge - Solo over to you
Some inspiration perhaps:-
NY movie, The Night, Evening. Light house at two lights, Queensborough Bridge and of course Nighthawks

Interesting about the Hopper connection, I've wondered before if the hotel design was influenced by this Hopper painting - House by the Railroad (1925)

or is this a fairly standard USA style of house ?