@pilou said:

Use Free-CAD
Import / Export!
STEP, IGES, OBJ, DXF, SVG, STL, DAE, IFC or OFF

Seems you can use some one for SU

Or Moment of inspiration but it's not the same price!
But you can send me the file in MP

The free 123D also
123D can IMPORT (Open) 123D, SKP, SAT,OBJ, DWG (3D solids), STP, 123C (Mesh content).
123D can export (Save As): STL, SAT, DWG, STP and its native 123D. you can also publish an image.

Thanks pilou,

FreCad would be great to convert 3D files to or from SU. The Collada format opens directly in SU. But I found it difficult to load the required conversion plugins into FreeCad. To import/export collada files from SU, the pycollada plugin is required and this involves installing Python, numpy and setuptools (http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Extra_python_modules#Installation_3).

I could not make it work -yet-, perhaps because there are many different versions of each. If someone has already done it, I would appreciate getting the information. If I manage to install it, I will send the detail method.

Thank you all for your very useful and comprehensive answers.

I had not updated SU since version 8 because I felt that improvements were oriented mainly to architectural users. Nothing wrong with that, as it is probably the larger market, but my activity is more concerned with engineering.

Finally I decided to update to SU 2014 (something must have improved) and it was A LOT faster. In a couple of days, I was most pleasantly surprised to receive an update to SU 2015, which is 64 bits!! Then I felt really glad to have updated!

I then set to move some very useful plugins to SU 2015. To cut this post short, I created a plugins folder at C:\ProgramData\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp*Plugins* and selectively copy-pasted the ones that did not produce errors into this new folder.

Then I installed the more complex plugins from the Extension Warehouse or the Window-Preferences-Extensions-Install Extension menu. Pefect, it worked. Now, unexpectedly, these plugins were automatically installed at a different Plugins folder: C:\Users\MYNAME\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2015\SketchUp\Plugins. I have it now up and running.

I hope this may be useful to someone.
And congratulations for all SU and plugin programmers.

@jolran said:

Hi! Sorry for late reply.

At the moment there is only crosshatching with edges. ver 1.6.

The pictures you have seen is probably screen-grabs from developpment.

I just want to assure you I have not abandoned the project. In the future those features will be available, if all goes well.

Thanks.

Hello jolran,

Great plugin, just what I was looking for. Only one question: Can the menu keep the last input values? (angle, spacing). This would be useful when there are several surfaces to be identically hatched.

For the rest I found no bugs. Surfaces with complex geometries, with holes, spirals Etc, hatched fine. Thanks a lot.

@tig said:

It is known that SketchyPhysics is implicated in ill-advisedly messing with some native base classes like 'Group', but I've never heard of it messing with DCs before
Other 'rogue tools' include DrivingDimensions, SunPosition, Matchbox and some versions of Podium...

I can now confirm that SketchyPhysics3 caused the problem. The problem was corrected after removing the sketchyphysics.rb and sketchysolids.rb files from the SU plugins directory on two different machines and operating systems:

TOSHIBA TECRA, WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL SP3, 32 BITS
APPLE PRO 8 NUCLEI, WINDOWS 7 PROFESSIONAL, 64 BITS (BOOTCAMP INSTALLATION)

I hope this may be useful if someone runs into the same problem.

@tig said:

It seems to work fine for me...
I assume that when it's scaled in X or Y you expect it to adjust to its new dimensions and change the number of bars it shows in that axis...
[If you want to to scale like a non-DC then it needs editing to removing the scaling tricks, or exploding and reforming without any DC attributes at all ?]
I know of no scripts that might interfere with this operation

Thanks Tig, I uninstalled a few plugins and it is working normally again. I strongly suspect Sketchyphysics may have produced the problem. I will try to confirm this by uninstalling Sketchyphysics in my laptop and check that the problem is corrected.

I tried to use some dynamic components created in SU Pro 7 in SU Pro 8 and they don'y scale properly. I tried them in SU Pro 7 and they work perfectly.

I thought there may be some incompatibility with plugins or the latest SU8 update, but I have the same problem in my laptop installation, on which I have not included a few recent plugins and is not not updated to the last release.

Has anybody come across the same problem?

I an attaching a DC as an example.

Dynamic component

@unknownuser said:

Nice work Thomas! I am going to check this out. I really hate trying to find small holes in groups!

Defects in solids are sometimes produced by carrying out SU boolean operations, and these are very difficult to find. SI is a most welcome tool. Thanks a lot!!

@unknownuser said:

i'm on a quad mac and do not have the slowness either.. SU is very responsive until i get into very high polycount territory..

when you say it runs slowly, are you talking only about how long it takes to open a file or are there other issues as well?

most of my skps open instantly (no noticeable pause at all).. files with a lot of textures/poly (25MB+) take maybe a second or two to open..

you may have something set up weird or SU may be running normally.. it's hard to tell because i'm not quite sure what you mean by 'slow'

I may well have something wrongly setup. It took me quite a while to discover that the Open GL option "Use fast feedbaback" was troublesome with the nVidia video card on the Windows machine. But stopwatch in hand, importing a 76 KB skp component into a 34 MB drawing takes 30 seconds on the Mac against 7 seconds on the laptop.

Opening the 34 MB file on the Mac is faster than on the Windows machine (40 sec, against 50 sec), probably due to the newer, faster hard disk.

Movement lag when orbiting is about the same on both machines. And sometimes drawing on the Mac seems to get somewhat sluggish (no measurements yet).

I am evaluating the possibility of using large single files for projects, originating any number of views and cuts. Modifications of the base file can be automatically updated in Layout, avoiding a lot of work and the possibility of errors.

@edson said:

diificult to answer your question unless one has two comparable computers side by side.

i for one use sketchup on a macbook pro and do not feel any slowness.

I would have expected that a smaller computer (dual core, 2GHz, 1GB RAM) would run the same SU version slower than the large machine (8 core, 2.26 GHz, 8 GB RAM). The Mac is 64 bit and very much faster for most tasks. I know operating in 64 bits may hinder some applications but it surprised me that importing .skp or other formats runs slowly, this being an essentially maths processing job.