Awsome work. When looking at their work, I feel like a kid with crayons - the extra large ones for preschoolers.

Well we sure got mileage out of this at work fast forwarding into the future at the (house of say the MACneils who of course met through cupidtino) The conversation would go like... OK Billy, let Suzy have the ipad, it's her turn, Steve!! How many times do I have to tell you, turn down that iTV, and Honey you are going to have to talk to Mellisa, she wants to date the Peter Carter , the MACdougal girl started dating her brother, and the next thing you know she's on Bing on her Blackberry and you know his father is being sued by that nice Mr Jobs for selling organic apples at the farmers market....

@dale said: Thanks Roger for that detailed explanation. A question... to create a hemispherical global, is it a matter of lens, or do you have to rotate the camera on the z axis as well? The answer is, it depends. You can use a 180 degree fisheye lens and lay on your back looking up and get a hemisphere in one shot. Or you take the other extreme and shoot a hundreds of shots with an extreme telephoto (in the x,y and z axes and stitch them together). The difference between the two is amount of work and resolution. The fish eye will be in the 5 to 10 megabyte range. The stitched image could be 40, 100 or even more gigabytes. [image: 7CUM_Mesa_Museum_Composite_sm_1.jpg] This is MAC (The Mesa Arts Center)in Mesa, Arizona. If I remember right this is composed of a matrix of 12 photos (4 across by 3 high). I guess the FOV might be 120 degrees. I had to do a fair amount of PS to get rid of the worst distortion. For comparison SketchUps dfault FOV is 35 degrees and I estimate our sharp field of view to be about 12 degrees. As humans we stitch the images in front of us all the time, but we do it in our brain and in our memory. At 12 degrees we are really looking through a keyhole, but as the eye scans a scene it gathers many views and stitches them together. In fact this is also HDRI as I took a normal and underxposed view of ever position so I could keep the sails from over exposing. We are looking at two layers of 12 shots each.

SU2Thea will do letter boxing, but in my understanding only when you have set custom camera. In SU2Thea you can change camera back to original (SU2Thea exporter > Scenes > SU Window in view parameters). If that happens for some other reason, maybe there is a bug. Some other renderers do use the same letter boxing too...

Guys, Now that we have the SU to Piranesi Competition of the ground http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=27639 I will order 10 baseball caps from the company in the UK. It really would be far too much hassle setting up a shop to sell the polos and caps. As Csaba says, we would be better off just giving them away with events here. I think I will order some extra caps and have them as prizes for the Speed Modeling Challenge also. Talking about auctioning Shirts and Polos! Brad Schell sent me his collection of 'signed' @Last and Google SketchUp T-Shirts some time back. I sent one to Ross for his young lad's birthday as he is a SketchUp fan. When I say 'signed', Brad wrote his name on the neck label. Or maybe his Mom did so he would not loose them in the laundry Anyway, I have 4 left and will raffle a couple of them off as they must now be SketchUp Collector's items. Mike [image: 7H0n_bradschell.jpg]

@daniel said: Maybe one day they will combine the paralympics with the regular olympics. I thnk that might be a good thing. I can picture it now, Tim Convey's "ski jumping" by Dorf

Dave, thats pretty much what I've been doing up till now, but the textures seem to come out a little greyed and aliased. Well I just quickly took some Cad hatches, and png'd them and added them as sketchy textures. They will take a little work to clean up and find or draw the right ones but it will work. I'll post the results in skp format when I get the time to work on it more. Here are some examples. [image: 2VmD_Picture133.jpg]

Thanks for the link. Interesting. I also liked the website format in general. Good marketing. I don't do that sort of building and am always curious how the envelope can calc. so well with so much glass and no-attic roofs, steel construction. Also curious about the waterproofing and roofing material on these so flat minimal roof profiles with clean fascia lines. Great looking house (in general) IMO.

Thank you. That resolution will work great, and the mapping is perfect.

Beautiful...thanks a bunch, Dale!

@dmatho said: Or the front-door Isetta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetta ? Cheers, . Diego . In the UK the 'bubble-car' was also sold as a 3-wheeled no-reverse-gear model - it was popular because it was legally a motorbike and so avoided taxes and driving-license requirements... My mum's cousin had one and loved it until one day he parked it facing a wall into a corner, against another car... The only door opens out at the front - there was a wall in way and the small sliding side windows were too close to other things to squeeze out of... With no reverse gear - he was stuck in the car for ages... until he got a passerby to push it away from the wall so he could get out of the door...

Thanks, and glad that siding was useful

A really inspirational read. This paper written by Alan Kay entitled " The Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". Yes it is a little off topic, but what the hell. m2007007a_revolution.pdf

Last one for right now. That damn work gets in the way of all my fun. Thanks for the comments. [image: 6izv_roseetecloseup2.jpg]

Just as a note: I had posted the same questions in the SMustard question section. Rick forwarded the question on to Dale Martens who responded back to me. By then I did (with all the suggestions here) have it solved, but I did let him know the methodology used to solve it. Good on them for the response.

thanks for the heads up dale. Very interesting stuff, and skechup it's used a lot and had a nice growth this year. not bad, not bad at all. (where's my old theachers that said that sketchup it's not for doing 3d architecture, just autocad?! )

Another forum "Duh!" for me is realizing there are a bunch of useful buttons way beyond the Google adsense blocks in the lowest part of the screen.

The "Most Original Image Treatment" section reminds me of one of those things from grade school, "Which of these don't belong..." -Brodie

Totally OT (sorry!), but this one's heaps of fun: http://www.amazon.com/Frank-Lloyd-Wright-Interactive-Portfolio/dp/0762419350/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255032881&sr=8-17