When I served in the army as an artillery scout, we indeed had to take magnetic deviation (declination) into account (well, it is obviously not indifferent where you shoot with a 152 mm cannon over a 25 km distance of course). I really doubt that such a small deviation would have any serious affect on how a model is placed on GE. Also, it changes from place to place and not even only up to the geographic location relative to the geographical and magnetic North but a bunch of other things can affect it. Is it really worth the hassle? What project do you have where it would be so important?

I would think about 2 options: Use a autolisp-routine to rename the autocad-block to include the wanted ATTDEF-info in the blockname. Then a ruby can parse the component-definition-name and store it where you want. Use a autolisp-routine to write some ruby's on the fly which does reference the block-name and store the wanted data back to the components.

I make the tut here http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=18811

Thanks for the heads up about Deep View! Question though: Anyone know how to create a 3d pdf directly from Deep View via Adobe Acobat Pro Extended? DV directly imports the .skp rather nicely, and it would great if you could simply create the 3d pdf right from DV. However, it seems that you are dependant on MS Office for the 3d pdf creation. While this works ok, you lose the scenes/model views when creating the 3d pdf. Unless I am missing something very obvious. Any ideas are greatly apreciated. C

I'd hold with the SLI until you can get things running stable. SLI is just another thing that might make things more complicated. In order to try to get to the bottom of this it's best to keep things simple.

Rhino's native sketchup export is not at all good, and will hopefully get a tune up before too long - it is likely it will be posted on the rhino labs page when they get around to it. In the meantime, try using these settings for a dwg export out of rhino, which i have had pretty good results from: I model in rhino in mm with a tolerance of .1 Autocad version - 2000 save curves as - splines save surfaces as - polygon meshes save polygon meshes as - polyface meshes curve options - use simple entities simplify tolerance .05 polygon mesh detailed options: as per model settings, which should be everything set to zero except max distance, edge to surface = 2 check refine mesh check simple planes in sketchup import dwg settings : millimeters, merge co-planer faces, but uncheck orient faces consistently as seems to come from rhino fine. The other way around this is to buy moi, and then immediately download the v2 beta, which has an absolutely fantastic sketchup exporter. Moi will open rhino files natively, and you can actually cut and paste between rhino and moi. - in fact, moi is coded by the same guy who originally created rhino; i just consider it a rhino plugin - it will pay for itself on the first job or two.... cheers rabbit