I personally would stay away from Autodesk stuff unless your are wanting to invest a SERIOUS, SERIOUS amount of time, money and resources into getting people up to speed on their 3d software. Maya and Max both have near vertical learning curves and prices literally 10x that of sketchup.

Modo302 may be a closer alternative, but I have no experience with that app.

I'm looking forward to see what else comes up in this thread.

Try the Design Click Build blog at Finewoodworking. He seems to specialize in chairs. You may have to hunt around a little on their site they just changed over to a new one so the posts are kind of broken up.

http://finewoodworking.taunton.com/blog/design-click-build

I have the same problem at home. A new graphics card that doesn't play well with SU, but I don't do enough work at home to worry about it.

Has anyone ever posted or compiled a list of good graphics cards that work well with SU? Especially ones in the 100 to 150 dollar catagory, or better yet under 100 dollars.

At work I use a Nivida GeForce 7800 GTX, although dated it has performed and still performs great.

I thought I posted here once but must have hit preview rather than submit

My wife and I just came back from a weekend at Hermann Missouri. It's a small German community just outside of St. Louis.

Try http://www.stonehillwinery.com Their cream sherry is awesome. We also liked the Adam Putcha winery. I couldn't find them online.

In regards to issue number 2.

I haven't found a way to import into cad without the lines over lines and breaks everywhere, but if you have a recent copy of autocad with the express tools installed there is a command called overkill. Just run it on the linework and it makes short work of cleaning up the redundants. It is a express tool. You may have to find your installation CD for Autocad and install the express tools, they don't install by default. I wish they did, there is a lot of useful tools in them.

They clearly need to issue a formal plan stating the direction they are headed with the software. If they would have discussed it, this entire thread wouldn't exist.

I'd say that if only one thing comes from all the posting and commenting here it is that GSU needs to develop a dialog between themselves and the pro users. Really that seems to be the heart of problem here.

Thanks everyone...

Looks like I'll just set up scenes and have a go at it. I thought there might be a better way.

We have a client possibly wanting to see a walkthough of a proposed church. We generally tell people that want these things that we don't do them or point them to someone who does, who then scares them with the price. This particular one would be simple enough I think we could do it in house. The client understands that ILM and Pixar are not going to be involved and isn't expecting as such.

Whats the best way to achieve this in sketchup. I've looked at Fraps and some others. What are people using to get simple walkthroughs in Sketchup?

Guys, I just wanted to thank you for your help yesterday. Right now I don't even know the right questions to ask. I'm going to play around with Vue for awhile and then hopefully be back with some good questions. I'll also post to this thread if I find any good tutorials on SU to Vue.

Thanks again

I set this to render last night right before leaving work. The sphere is modeled in SU using the windowizer plugin. It took 4 hours to render. I'm hooked.

This is directly imported into Vue and rendered with no adjustments other than deleting some of the components that scaled wrong. I intend to completly revamp this into Vue when time allows. I'll post more when I have it.

Friday I was having trouble importing a SU model. Certain Groups were rotated 90 degrees from what they should have been and materials didn't come in correcly. Today I tried importing the same model and everything went just fine. (it even linked to the original SU file) The only thing I did different was use a new vue file for importing. Must have been something with the terrain and existing textures messing things up. I'm also importing the SU file directly. Is there some advantage to creating a obj file out of it first?

Additionally I'm confused about the unit coversion between the two programs. I can't seem to make 1 unit in SU = 1 unit in Vue. Both programs are set to imperial.

I've just discovered the Vue PLE and love it. Geekatplay.com has some great stuff on just Vue but I'm not finding any material on using it with sketchup. Does anyone know of some tutorials covering its use with sketchup, or just have some advice. It looks as though this could really fill a void with what I want to achieve with my modeling. Any help is appreciated.

I would love to see a tutorial/workflow about the process you used to create these. You definitely need to get on that book idea of yours I read about in another post.

Not to turn this into a cad post, but....Something else you could try is setting the mbuttonpan system variable to 0 instead of 1. It takes the middle mouse button and sets it to bring up the osnaps menu when hit (its transparent to so it works within all commands). It's the first thing I do after a new install of ACAD. New users hate it but for us old time cad users it just makes cad feel right. After I mapped my AutoCAD pgp file to mimic SU (Yes I actually did) that helped to. Unfortunately you will have to resort to typing p everytime you wish to pan in cad.

Sorry, I read that wrong. I thought you wanted exporting options.

Sketchup Pro has fbx capabilities. If autodesk has changed/updated fbx, then you will probably have to wait for Google to get the update into sketchup.

I'm sure someone else knows more than I do about this.

Good question.

This would be really interesting if someone could figure out how to get the point cloud data into skechup. Almost a poor mans lidar.

Go to options-->user preferences then there is a section on undo/redo. Check off the combine zoom and pan commands. I don't know what system variable this is controlling but that should take the zoom actions out of the undo/redo stack.

This was introduced in 2007 I think. So if your running an older version this option won't be there.

I'm not going to say this isn't possible in sketchup, but you may be better off importing it into an actual civil application. Especially when trying to do cut/fill/balance reports.

We recently purchased Carlson Software's civil module for Autocad. You can check them out at http://www.carlsonsw.com/

Carlson probably has one of the shortest learning curves of all the civil apps, and it's price is low compared to autodesk alternatives, but this is assuming you are VERY WELL VERSED in autocad to begin with.

Anyway maybe someone knows something about doing more advanced civil work with sketchup that I don't. I've searched for cut and fill rubies before and not found anything.

I'm sure SU7 will have this built in.