I had a similar 'plight' with a design I was creating for a very large model of a bespoke hospitality (tensile/inflatable) structure being built on the beach at Cannes - the model was constructed in SKP to show a beautiful pitch render (to the MS client) via Lightup, as well as serve as technical layouts, construction details, and work-in-progress sign-off scamps in Layout. The necessary additional detail/model (including glowing inflatable cell-structure) size was killing my renders (and my soon to be updated PC), so I came to the state of breaking the model down and 'sub-render' (eg the exhibition zone) elements. Sketchup & Lightup work brilliantly - it is just the scale of my designs that sometimes get in the way!! I would concur and suggest 'pretty house' and 'real house' models! There are limits with all of this. Good luck with it!

Done. Thanks again!!

Frank, it's not a bug. See your other post. I moved it from the Bugs forum.

@box said: Oddly John, I'm struggling to find the point let alone the helpful part of your post. I was just wondering why he bought software that offers a free trial without actually trialling it first. He claims to be a cheapskate, yet he probably spent $80 on software that he found was of no use to him. He could have taken the free trial and found that out for absolutely nothing.

Try moving the component towards the boundaries of the edit box. (Rectangle select everything first within the edit box of the component). I guess three sides are origins for the edit box and won't resize automatically.

IF you can, access the ShadowInfo hash directly rather than changing EVERYONE's DynamicComponent class. See: ShadowInfo P.S.: It would be nice if possible, to append a custom DC function, in a singleton manner, to ONLY the specific DC instance in question, rather than modify EVRYONE's set of DC functions. (But I'm not sure it can be done, the way the DCs are currently coded.)

I'm getting close to the solution here. I think I can figure this out using the SUNELEVATION, SUNANGLE, and LATITUDE functions (I'll have to dust off my spherical geometry and celestial navigation skills). I do have one follow-on question: How do you get a dynamic component to continually update based on changes in the model? In other words, how do I get SUNANGLE to update if I change the Time of Day in the Shadows menu? Thanks for your help! Frank.

Thanks, Gai, for the advice. I'll definitely check out TIG's tool to snag the loose geometry, which I'm SURE I have (I just can't find it easily). Sounds like a good plug-in to run periodically for good model maintenance.

All, Thanks for the advice on the .csv file. I'm pretty familiar with excel and its capabilities, and what I have works OK, but I have to do a lot of fiddling with the spreadsheet before I can get it into a useable state. What I found works really well is to pre-format a blank worksheet with all of the headers and column widths the way I want them, then hide the columns that I won't use. I then copy and paste the data from the .csv into the blank (cntrl+shift+end from the first cell of the .csv, then cntrl+V into the first cell of the .xlsx). So, no problem with getting the results I want after a few steps. I was just wondering if a plug-in existed that would do all of that output management up-front so I could export exactly what I want into the spreadsheet and save a few steps. Thanks, again, for your help! Frank