Thank you!
sigh... I wish I had these when I was in college... It would have saved me a bunch of time.

I once remember trying to use AutoCAD in Spanish... Everything was so different from what I was accustomed to, I could barely work!

Same thing happened to me when trying GIMP... It gave me no choice at all, but simply showed me the supremely annoying Spanish translation of the interface... I was so mad that I was about to uninstall it, when I finally decided to calm down, count to 10 and look for help on the Web... to no avail.

Until I finally figured out that there must be a folder called "languages" or something like that in the program folder... so I found it and emptied it! (It was GIMP-2.0\share\locale)

So now I can use GIMP in English and take advantage of all the help found on the Web in English.
Man, what a relief...
I prefer having to consult WordWeb (a free English dictionary) a couple of times instead of having to re-learn all the photo manipulation terminology in Spanish.

Yes, I should have. Please excuse my lazyness.

Ok, here's a quick render of the now-famous warehouse, before...

and after applying the action:

I programmed the F7 key to activate the action. As you can see, this works best in dark interiors with bright windows.

Render took 2 minutes in Podium evaluation version 1.6 on my old Core 2 Duo E6300. I took the .hdr output and tone-mapped it in Photomatrix before applying the filter in Photoshop.

By the way, how do you prevent your image attachments from becoming framed with slide bars? [correction: scroll bars]

Just follow Solo's advice and keep another SketchUp instance open just for creating such components, so you keep your main working space clean.

A workaround:

1. Make sure the circle/curve you'll use as a path touches an edge of the profile

2. Before using the follow me tool, select the edge of your circle/curve and press Ctrl+C

3. After using the tool, go to Edit > paste in place.

Now you have your original circle back, ready to give you its center by inference.

If you do this frequently, set Ctrl+Shift+V as a shortcut for "paste in place".

"Nurbz" is how Nurbs is spelled in lolspeak. Come on, any frequent visitor of icanhascheezburger.com knows that.

+1.

SketchUp is lacking in that department... You have to stop walking to "look around". This just breaks any small illusion of actually being there you might be experiencing... If gamepad control isn't doable, it would be really cool to at least be able to walk with the keyboard and look around with the mouse, at the same time.

Wow... It seems that there are alternatives for everything nowadays...
Is this program related in any way to the IntelliCAD project?

Here I re-imported the final JPG as a texture and applied it to a face. Remember that the illusion only works from one point of view...

And I attached the .skp with two scenes: One shows the geometry used to create the texture, the other the applied texture (actually, an optimized version so you don't have to download such a big file).

SketchUp 7

I guess I'm the last person on this forum to figure out how to do this, but nevertheless here it goes:

1. Let's say you have a boring pedestrian street and you'd like to do some pavement art in Julian Beever's style. First, you decide where your observer will be and mark that point (In this case, SketchUp's Sang):
   

2. Then you place a camera there, considering the eye height of the average person in your country, and start sketching your art. In this case, we want to create the illusion of a rectangular hole in the pavement with a strong presence of the Dark Side. You then export that image at a high resolution. Of course a rendered one would be cooler, but we're just illustrating the principle here.
   

3. Now we take that exported (or rendered) image from step 2 and crop it in Photoshop checking the "perspective" option, carefully placing the control points in the four corners of the hole:
   

4. If you did the cropping carefully, the proportions of the resulting image will correspond to that of the "hole" in the pavement.
   
   Now all you have to do is transfer this to the street using your favorite method: Vinyl printing, projection, drawing by hand with the help of a grid, etc.

Well, if the buyer is outside the jurisdiction of the seller, no VAT should be charged.

For example, Skype charges me no VAT, because they're located in Europe, and I'm in Ecuador.
When I buy something from Adorama Camera (NY) and have it sent to Miami, FL, I have to pay no taxes, but if I have it sent to Brooklyn, NY then I do have to pay the NY state tax.

Why am I under the impression that I am witnessing the rise of Dalí's successor?

What you need is something similar in principle to the FFD, but that would allow you to set your own initial points anywhere you like instead of starting with a rectangular grid.

And it would be much better if the deformation worked in a similar way to Fredo's F-splines (curve passes through control points), instead of how the FFD currently works (deformed surface is detached from control points).

I see a lot of potential in such a script. Besides posing characters, it could also be used a lot in amorphous architecture... The FFD is nice but this would be like a super-turbo-charged version of it.

After adjusting the levels (Ctrl+L) and adding a "Bloom effect"...

1. Open in Photoshop and press Ctrl+Shift+L. This will get rid of any color cast. If you want more control, press Ctrl+L, click on "Auto" and then drag the sliders for each channel (R,G,B) until you're satisfied.

2. Go to the 3D warehouse and enter this search term: Tree Maker. You'll find almost perfect trees. If you want to make your own, go to this thread:
   http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=14959&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=treemaker

3. You need to find larger textures (not larger in pixels, but representing a larger real-world area) in order to make the tiling less noticeable. I'm attaching a grass texture that has been shared a couple of times in this forum (or was it another forum?)

JPG inside zip

1. When the 'scroll wheel zoom' is not working as you wish... Press Z and zoom the good, old fashioned way.

2. To zoom on the selection, Right click > Zoom extents.

3. Until you get used to the 3-point perspective SketchUp uses, you might want to activate the colored crosshairs (Window > Preferences > Drawing > Display crosshairs).

My 2 cents.

Real-time physics simulator... check.
Real-time unbiased rendering... Hmmm...

It seems we'll be free for another 20 years before the machines decide that technology is ready to recreate The Matrix.

Now I understand.

In those cases, you can almost always find a workaround that won't cost you more than three additional clicks. But if you want a more automatic way, right now Google is having a poll on what should be improved in SketchUp, and provides an empty box for comments at the end of it.

Wow, thank you both for the quick answers.

As soon as wikii releases his follow_me_and_keep script you'll know why I asked

Please excuse my ignorance.
How are these little "cuttings" called?
And the little holes?

I know these are featured everywhere in castles, watchtowers, etc., and have something to do with defense...