@bmike said:

Exchanged the Medium for the Small today, just using the basic Intuous Pen and Touch version.

Good move - same model I have. Once you get the settings for speed and acceleration dialed you can flick with your wrist and land anywhere on the screen - makes it really fast for choosing menus / changing tools using the toolbar for example. (one of the reasons I never bothered with the radial menu).

I had bought the wireless kit for the previous model I owned, and luckily it is fully compatible with the new one. I use it wired when I'm at my desk, but wireless for surfing/TV.

I know a lot of people feel like Dave does, re: using it in SU. I think that's definitely true when using a larger tablet - it makes cursor movement and navigation really painful because of how much re-positioning you have to do.

And there are a few things it doesn't do as well as a mouse, but for me the trade-off is more than worth it. These days I find it interminably slow and tiring using a mouse. It takes some time to groove new instincts, and whether that training period is worth it is a personal thing. (Plus there's the risk that you'll invest that time and still hate it.)

But since that seems to be the majority opinion around here, I thought it would worth hearing the minority report!

Just wanted to register my satisfaction with this plugin. I bought it to help me generate a set of half-spiral stairs for a client project.

The plugin itself is well-done and works flawlessly. But what really impressed me is how well Garry K supports it. He has been tremendously helpful in showing me how to generate output from it that it was not specifically designed to do. (in this case a single central steel stringer)

And with every query —and there were several in my case!— his replies were prompt and on-point. Really a pleasure to deal with.

Highly recommended to anyone who needs to resolve a spiral stair conundrum.

Doug

Hi Mike —

Answered your other post on the Wacom, so thought I'd fill in on this one. I have the right button set to zoom extents — which makes zoom management 2nd nature: zoom in and out with the standard in/out axes, then re-set with zoom extents with a simple click:

The left button is mapped to this radial menu:

There's a lot of flexibility in mapping to the buttons/menus, but there's no way to map everything that you use regularly, especially with only two hardware buttons. (one of the reasons I'm thinking of eventually upgrading to a Space Mouse). Truth be told I still use the keyboard shortcuts most of the time even for those I've mapped to the radial menus.

The radial menus would probably be more useful if they had 8 segments — like the Wacom radial menu— instead of just the four quadrants. If you have to nest menus for tools you use all of the time it's questionable whether any time is actually saved versus moving your hand back to the keyboard.

Obviously, getting used to a new setup and grooving new instincts is always challenging —as JQL describes— but even with moving my left hand from the 3D mouse back and forth to the keyboard, for me it's still much faster (and way more fun!) modelling with it than without.

Set up properly it's also great for navigating in your browser — and even in Excel! You get very used to left-handed navigation and it becomes 2nd nature pretty quickly.

Have fun!

Hi Mike --

I have almost exactly the set-up you've recently acquired: Space Navigator along with an Intuos Pen & Touch (small). I think this two-handed approach is a fantastic way to work with both faster/more subtle navigation and much less wear & tear on your wrist/elbow than a mouse.

This is my 3rd Wacom — which I originally bought to relieve an RSI probably 15 years ago — so I'm pretty acclimatized to using it. They've gotten much better and I love the compactness and feel of my current one.

Depends on what you're doing with it, but I've never found I've needed the extra sensitivity of the Pro model. Plus, as you say - they're huge, especially compared to the actual sensing area of the tablet. My first Intros was a medium, but my last two have been smalls, which I prefer because I can navigate the full screen / menus and such with little or no re-positioning of my hand/wrist.

As for settings... obviously it's personal and these might not all work well for someone unaccustomed to a pen tablet, but here are mine:

I've set up express keys to be consistent across all the applications:

I've played a lot with the pen settings but have ended up right down the middle as the best balance of properties, with the lower button setting for middle click (works well for Orbit) and the upper one for right click :

Ironically I rarely use the tablet in Pen mode —too slow— but when I do the mapping used is this (mapped to my two external screens —24" landscape / 20" portrait and excluding my 13" laptop screen):

Mouse mode settings are these: I find that very high acceleration with medium speed hits the right balance for me in both navigating quickly and being able to control finer movements when zoomed in:

I much prefer the hover click mode for middle / right-clicking:

In touch mode I have speeds maxed, with the exception of Double Tap:

I have all the touch gestures enabled for when I'm not in SU — great for surfing / Apple TV with the on-screen keyboard — which map pretty much the same as the Mac OSX touch gestures:

Haven't set up the radial menu, since I never use the express keys in SU mode — they're too far away to hit without moving your hand. Though I suppose you could map it to one of the button settings on the pen, if you're using the 3D mouse exclusively for navigation. I've left it this way, since I often throw the Wacom in with my laptop when I'm out of the office, and it makes for decent navigation when the Space Navigator isn't in the mix.

Hope it helps, and let me know if you have any questions.

@driven said:

the whole point of any maintenance update is to deal quickly with reported splats...

each release has an overview of the changes, do they reflect a possible correction of your issues?

Well I just updated so we'll see. Many of mine were outliner-related: often when trying to change nesting order directly in the outliner. Didn't see anything in a quick scan of the release notes re the outliner, so don't know if this release will prove to be more stable in my case.

(Although I have gone back to cutting and pasting in place in the model instead of shuffling groups/components in the outliner. Slower by far, but I got fed up with the splats. Kind of defeats the value of the outliner if you can't trust it for the purpose.)

@driven said:

After a considerable amount of bug chasing on mac's, I find recurring issues being related to 'plugin observers' and 'Auto Save', so I avoid both whenever possible...

To do this I disable many plugins until I actually want to use them, including the SU ones, and any 'renderers'...

I normally try to keep the number of enabled plugins in any given session to a minimum, but I realized that I had installed several new ones of late and left them all enabled, so a good reminder to pare it back down.

As for the autosave, that's a tough one... and a bit ironic that the feature meant to ameliorate the results of a crash can be responsible for those very splats. I've tried to get in the habit of manual saves, but the more engrossed I am in modelling the less likely I am to remember. I would have lost an awful lot of work this last week if it weren't for the autosave file whittling it down to 5 or 10 minutes of lost work per crash.

Thanks for your thoughts and 'best practices'.

Doug

I'm running SU Pro version 15.0.9349 on Mac OS 10.9.5 and have downloaded the latest maintenance update (not sure the version number).

Before I overwrite my current version —which works but is splatting with alarming frequency— I want to check if anyone has had any stability issues with the latest build? Also, whether there are can be any issues with recognizing the license with the update?

Reason I'm checking is that I'm on deadline and I don't have time to mess with SU not working for any reason. On the other hand I've been splatting 3-4x (min) a day of late, and even with autosave that's a lot of lost time and work.

If the latest build is more stable, then updating now will save me time and aggravation... but if there's any question of potential issues, then I'll wait.

So anyone who is using the latest build, is all OK? Is it likely to be more stable than my current version?

Thanks in advance,

Doug

Thanks Dave — that was it.

I thought I must have changed a setting that affected the behaviour. I guess I've never run into it before, because I had never messed with the transparency settings for my default drawing style, but did so recently for a scene used in a layout document. Should have cloned the style and made a new one.

Figured it was something basic, but didn't connect the two. Thanks for short-circuiting the source of annoyance for me!

At the risk of being banished to the doh! thread, I'm having an issue with bounding boxes. I'm not sure if this is something new, but I never remember there being any offset between outside component dimensions and the bounding box borders.

Of late it seems all components have a small offset to the bounding box — which is incredibly annoying (this is the case even when all guides are erased in the model)

Example below: draw new rectangle / push pull / make component =

So my query is this:

has it always been thus, and I just didn't notice (don't think so)
or, is it new behaviour with the new version (2015)
or have I inadvertently changed some setting that affects the bounding box behaviour / display?

or some other explanation?

It's not just a visual distraction, but it also makes it tougher to see/find/pick/inference the various reference points between components, especially in a complex model.

Anyone have a solution?

@sdmitch said:

@db11 said:

How tough is it to add an inside radius variable for the spiral stair generator to allow curved stair creation?

I'm trying to make a 180° curved staircase with and inside radius of about 3'.

Something like this?

Exactly like that.

It will be a single stringer (u-channel) open tread stair. I figured I could generate a follow-me path for the stringer chord pretty easily by simply joining the bottom centre points of the treads.

@oceanembers said:

I can't help you with the code, I don't know Sketchup's API very well at all, but as for a starting point for learning...

http://learnrubythehardway.org/book/

I used this to learn the basics of ruby, and I thoroughly reccomend it.

Starting to learn Ruby is on the to-do list once I'm through my current set of deadlines. Thanks for the link and the recommendation. I'll check it out.

@garry k said:

This script creates a simple plugin that traverses your model and creates a csv file

That's great Gary — does exactly what I want. Many thanks,

Doug

How tough is it to add an inside radius variable for the spiral stair generator to allow curved stair creation?

I'm trying to make a 180° curved staircase with and inside radius of about 3'.

I want to be able to export (as .csv) simple lists of model info such as styles / scene names etc with a Ruby code snippet.

I'm sure it must be quite straight forward, but I'm clueless with Ruby. (though I would like to start learning it).

What I need at the moment is just a code stub that will generate the csv file from one class of model info — right now I need the style names — and I can swap out the different methods for other info once I understand the basics.

Anyone have a starting point for me?

Thanks,

Doug

Why don't you go over and post your query in the forum at Garage Journal — http://www.garagejournal.com

They have a particular focus on vintage garage paraphernalia, and tons of knowledgable people there. I'd be surprise if you didn't get a very informed answer there.

@mo53ley said:

We're ramping up production as fast as possible but Chinese new year doesn't help

John
3Dconnexion

John, any date set for CadMouse support in 3dxWare for Mac OSX?

Looks nice. I'm looking for a new mouse, and this one is definitely now on the short list.

One potential issue is that they currently list windows-only support. Given that it also uses 3dxWare (same as their 3D mouse), hopefully a Mac-supported version is in the pipeline.

@olishea said:

No refurbs or second hand. You must have a full warranty on all parts.

Apple Store refurbs have the same warranty as new Macs: 14 day return / 90 day support / 1 yr warranty / Apple Care available. So no reason to exclude them from consideration.

That said, I don't think Jeff or anyone else thinks that you can't get more rendering power for less cash in a build-your-own scenario than any other.

The actual cost comparison should include the soft costs (including the value of the many hours spent researching/purchasing/assembling/loading OS & Drivers etc...). For most if us, we want to use the tool to get work done, not work to get the tool done.

For me, the f.ck-around factor —and hours spent trouble-shooting things that should work but don't (incompatible components/driver issues etc..)— isn't worth the cash saved.

If it is for you, great! Happy that you like your new box as much as I like my new Mac. No doubt we each bought something —as did Jeff— that meets our current needs well.

@pixero said:

v1.0.2
Added session memory of settings.

Perfect. Makes a great tool even better. Thanks!

@pixero said:

Remembering settings, it's is on my to do list.

Perfect! Will look forward to upcoming releases.

@driven said:

@db11,
have you tried this setting when drawing?
john

No I haven't, but I will try it. Thanks for the tip.