Hi Jim - Thanks for the response. I should have dug around a bit more before posting this question. Laziness, I'm afraid. Up until now, I haven't needed to specify more than one position for copies generated using the COPIES function. I should have known, from the DC stairs I've seen, that you can specify PosX,PosY, and PosZ attributes for copies at the same time (and any other attribute, for that matter).

I am sort of starting to hope that we had a separate Metric version of Sketchup. The present situation is that the majority of users have to cope with a shoddy translation system added to an odd medieval system of measures that bounces on you whenever you turn your back. Anssi

@khai said: @dave r said: If I was going to have another input device, I would like to have a box with a bunch of custom labelled buttons I could program for the shortcuts. take a look at the N52te i have one of the older ones and used to use it all the time. programmed macros for ACAD and SkethUp on it. Set the 'throttle' for zoom, and the directional keys for often used query functions. Had copy, paste, rotate, move, etc. all set up too. Sort of forgot about it when I got a new machine. Should dig it up... The only problem I found with it is that when I would teach I wouldn't be able to slow down enough and remember the keyboard shortcuts...

Thanks, Chris and TIG. I think a quick change of the layer color in the DWG exported from SketchUp from within Autocad is the quick fix here. (Chris, you got the scenario just right).

Another one http://www.teamviewer.com/nl/index.aspx Bep

If you have SU Pro, you can export a 2D plan view DWG, and re-import that Anssi

Yea - the revit system is awkward. I'm not to happy about the Autosave system in SU - too many people at work completely ignore the "Autosave_" bit of a filename and use that to continue working on. Make it very hard to know which files can be removed.

I've given up on Photomatch for birds eye view images. The lens angle, and the fact that the imagery is cropped - makes it pretty much impossible. I do it by hand now; load the imagery as a background watermark set the AOV to about 6-8 degrees hide anything other that key features of the model pan/zoom by hand to get an approximate match. finish off in post

@unknownuser said: Are you using the COPIES feature to create the copies? Sometimes. I'd prefer to use a direct count of the component, if possible. When I do use the COPIES function, the component I want to count is embedded a few levels in. So I might have: First Level: Main DC Second Level: Component to copy Third Level: Component to count (say 10 copies of this component for every Second Level component) I suppose I could use the COPIES function on the second level, and multiply by the copies of the Third Level component.

Thanks, all. This is exactly what I needed.

lso worth mentioning that "Hidden line" face style will not be shaded (when sun is turned off). This is good to know when you need to export some 2d thing for post-precessing (like creating alpha masks and such). Also it does not use the default material but the beckground colour.

Hello, I experimented a little with modules now and I think (hope) I now understand the use of them. Despite all your great help it took me several hours till I found this: @unknownuser said: Like class methods, whenever you define a method in a module, you specify the module name followed by a dot and then the method name. Before that I used the method name without the module name in front and nothing worked... Matthias

@danbig said: Has anyone come up with a good way to save a few different workspaces for sketchup? I'm on Windows XP with SU Pro 7.1 Well.. on Windows, Sketchup saves all the data in the User hive of the Registry, so... the only (easy) way now, to run SU differently OR run diferent minor releases of the same major Sketchup version, is to create separate User accounts on Windows. In your case.. the NORMAL user for mutli-screen, and a SECONDARY account for single-screen. There are filesharing issues however. You'd need to save your models in the 'All Users' folder tree (displays as 'Shared Documents') so you could access them from both accounts. (..or just "Share" the secondary user's Documents folder and subfolders.) After making the secondary account, you log off it, and onto the normal account. Then when you need to run Sketchup in single-screen mode, you do a "Run As..." (right-click your Sketchup icon, and choose 'Run As..',) and run Sketchup as the secondary user, but still you can run anything else as the primary user (most importantly your email client,) etc. because your still logged on as the primary user. You'd never really ever need to log onto the secondary user, if the primary user is an administrator; because admin's can see all user hives in regedt32.exe in case you need to look at the secondary's SU settings in the Registry. So your just using the secondary user account, to create a separate User Hive to save Sketchup settings for a Single-Screen mode. (You could even name the user SingleScreen.)

Hmmm. Ok, at least I know that I'm not the only one. Luckily, almost all of my models have geometry in them. Thanks, Chris.

Perfect. Thank you, TIG.

@davidboulder said: I haven't looked through this entire post. Good, don't waste your time Just watch the videos and if there is one you like, then use code associated to that video. Much of the thread was me rambling on and on. @davidboulder said: As long as I was careful how I named my scenes, I could drop swap out my SketchUp fle in my Layout project, and get a quick shadow studies for any project. I think that is an neat idea too. I find myself drawn to video and animation for this type of study personally, but whatever works for what you need it for. I would like to develop a full script that layers multiple shadow times on top of eachother and colors them differently - maybe blue red and orange or something for morning noon and afternoon, for each day of the year. I think that is potentially a useful script. Bytheway, Al at renderplus has a script that will layer shadows on top of each other and output them as a single image. I think it is part of his NPR (non-photo-real) toolkit. I'm not sure if it costs or is free. But he developed that after we had some discussions along this line, about how to layer shadows. It is workth looking at. Chris

I dont know if it is the same thing, but I made some dynamic windows. I needed 3 different versions e.g casement sliding and awning. the windows did not need animation just sizing and costs attached. I made the first DC and basically copied and changed attributes to suit. This works fine when I need all sliding on the job but when I need a combination of several I find that the code reverts back to the original DC file i copied originally. I ended up redoing all 3 versions of windows from scratch, as no matter what I did I could never gethem to work (in the same model anyway)

Updated model attached. You may need to play with the Portrait/Landscape orientation. Sharp 235 Dynamic_A.skp