@unknownuser said:

Will be interesting to see how fast people take advantage of your offer.....cheers!

Yeah. I found most of my friends don't care or find it a bit to BETA for their tastes. Thats why I'm offering it here. A bit more tech savvyness I'd think. We'll see.

I always have appreciated the philosophy of Google and they have been good to make all kinds of useful information belong to people, not to corporates(in terms of their mission statement). I think they are making efforts to make the exclusive format of DWG more universal. This is just start. For those who want to make this world better, they need to participate and put up with the inconvenience along the necessary change.
A corporate can easily dominate a market with their enormous money and sometimes the method that the company takes along their profit is not necessarily good for the majority of human kind. Once it happens, it is really hard to make it back. I believe Google is the one of those corporates with good will. I value their idea that they try to bring the result of one's effort back to the creator(3D model and its information to the creator in this case). There are many ways to work around; you can stick to the previous version, you can buy or download a DWG import/exporter ruby plugin, or just buy the Pro version. I have benefited from all the things Google provides for free. May be, this is one small thing that I can participate to support their philosophy, having patience and shifting from old habit to new one.

Thanks! I'm an idiot. Should really read the instructions some time.

Got my license yesterday! 😍

HOWEVER,if you have an image with this course of brick ANYWHERE (there must be some with it on the top or something), you can always position that image...

BINGO! I changed the axis and must have pointed it down and not up. I have the view axis off so I didn't notice it. Hooray rightside up components. You rock.

Sounds like a cache-ing problem to me.

Thanks all and especially for the tree link Boofredlay, can always use new components. I really need to take some time and learn photoshop better. Any suggestions for a good tutorial or book. All my work is Architectural related so a series geared toward that would be best. I've downloaded Kerkythea 2008 and plan on reading up.

pretty easy to make su materials from an autocad hatch pattern. export from autocad your desired hatch pattern as a jpg --> open jpg in ps and crop --> import into su as a material.

jb

Normally when I see that kind of artefacting I'd say you tried overclocking your graphics card and the memory got damaged.

The nVidia 8500's seem to work well with SU, so my first port of call would be to try a diffrent driver. Try installing the latest driver. If you are already using the latest driver, then try an earlier driver (from say a few months ago). Failing that I'd have the graphics card tested.

Also, I'm not really aware of any hardware that'll make SU scream. For the some or other really really really stupid reason SU doesn't support contemporary hardware the way it should. You'll be better off with a highly clocked CPU (dual and quad core CPU's don't directly relate to better performance in SU6 ATM - might just help with other apps running in the background), an 8xxx series nVidia graphics card (the 8800 GTX really rocks for a gaming class card) and between 2 and 4GB of RAM (depending on your usage and OS). Since your machine complies to most of the previous, I wouldn't spend my money on a new machine just yet, wait until SU7 sees the light of day to see if the situation changes.

Visually the building itself is very interesting but like you said the site needs some work. There are a few things you could try while rendering directly from SU but to really get an image to "come to life" Photoshop or some other editing program should be used.

A few suggestions:
1.Adjust the shadows darkness a little more to help the relationship between the building and the site read a little clearer. Currently the shadows get lost.
2.Another thing could be to render without lines but this only works really well if there is enough detail in the model. This often helps in making the model feel more realistic.
3.Add shrubs and varying species of ground cover. I'm sure some will exist on the site somewhere.

Along with the other mentioned comments you should be well on your way.
Goodluck.