I might as well tack my inquiries to this thread as I am about to try to do what mgianzero is/was doing a few months ago. I'm about to remodel a kitchen and adjoining utility (laundry) room/garage access. Some months ago I tape-measured and created a SU model of the utility room, but only of it's inside-facing surfaces (walls without thickness) and the project went no further. Now I've found our house plans and I'm thinking (as mgian--Marc did) that raising the house from those would be easier than measuring it out manually.

So Gaieus has suggested to import a raster file (.tif? .jpg? .gif?) and to scale it. Is there a video or tutorial for that? Does it come in as a lot of pieces of a group that you stretch together to a hand-entered length? My experience with SU is limited--I have one previous thread here, where I was creating an underground geological "landscape". You folks were great help to me finishing that project. Sadly, I have not had the time or need to do anything else with SU until now.

Gealagie, also a Mark

Thank you, Bep and Gaieus. I hope my brother-in-law will adopt sketchup for his business. It would be a great design and sales tool for him. We shall see.

Some day I may have a go at creating some geology-realistic rocks. When I do I'll put them out here for anyone to use.

Hi all. I would like to point my brother-in-law toward using SU for his landscaping business. He designs and builds koi ponds, decorative waterfalls, and such. Do any of you remember a forum that discussed modeling stuff like this? A search I just tried did not turn anything up. I also did not see a wide assortment of landscape rocks available in/at the Google 3D Warehouse. Anyone know where he might find some ready-modeled ones to get started?

I could have used additional help on organizing elements within a complex project. Slowly, the suggestions by regular contributors have begun to sink in and now I think I could do a better job of organizing than my initial (and largest) project to date. Specifically--

1. Demonstrate the recommended workflow of creating geometry on layer 0, grouping or componenting that geometry and moving it to a defined layer.

2. Stressing that elements of a group or component can exist on different layers. I have no idea why someone would want this to happen (is there an instance where this would be advantageous?). Show how to best "fix" things should you inadvertently get a group spread across different layers.

3. Stressing the workflow championed by Solo--creating pieces of the total and saving those components out to their own .skp file and importing them into a master composition file. This approach makes a lot of sense to me now for reasons of organizational and library-building.

I agree the Intro to Rubies tut would be a good thing. Another idea would be to preview a number of the most useful rubies to show just what they do and how they work, and perhaps discuss differences between rubies that do similar things.

Just to conclude this thread or my contribution to it, my problem appeared to be related somehow to using SU through a Linux machine that is remotely controlling a Windows PC where the instance of SU is installed and running. Not sure I said that right, but you probably understand. The system we use to provide Windows on a Linux desktop is Citrix, which I understand is not really a Windows emulator but actually a remote control of the distant Windows pc. However I also understand the same sort of problems with exporting animations happens with the Windows emulator Wine (I think it's an emulator), as reported in the link a few posts above.

If this thread would fit better somewhere other than Newbie, then feel free to refile it.

FYI, the suits were impressed--enough to purchase the Pro if we needed it. Funny though, I have now tested this by comparison and I was using the cut-down free version all the time (well, except for the first 8 trial days). I never noticed anything go away after the first 8 days so I assumed I was just living with Pro on borrowed time--that's a newbie for you! Anyway I'm concluding at this stage of our use that we can get along fine with the freebie version and wait to pick up Pro at a later date. Thank you all again for the help you gave me getting through this. We are taking the exported animation to a trade show next week, where I suspect it may draw some attention.

Our moderator remus has helped me considerably today and I wish to thank him for all his trouble and his insights. Just another of the many fine people I've come into contact with at this forum site. You guys make learning SU fun. Well, it's fun to learn anyway, but you guys make it even better!

Thanks for your time. It's working for you--I wonder about the person who posted it as a bug at the link I included above?

I just created a new little test model, created scenes and tried the export again with the same results. Yes I am sitting in front of a Linux machine, but SU is running on a Windows PC somewhere else and coming to me over a network via a "Citrix" emulator/server (beyond that description I will have to bring in the IT guys). I don't know what you mean by a "PM". Do you think if I sent you a small .skp file you might have a different result?

Thanks I looked all over....

I hate to trouble anyone out there, but does anyone have a sec to test whether their SU ver 7 will export an .avi file properly?

I'm having difficulty finding a link to the legal text of the Pro 7 License Agreement. I need to have someone read over it before we purchase SU7. Can anyone point me to it? I have looked all through the SketchUp Google site.

I got an IT mgr involved, he downloaded/installed the codec and that didn't fix it. He also found evidence this is a new bug to Pro7. Read here: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16492. Have any of you guys seen this before?

I get the following when I try to export an .avi animation file. Do I need a plugin? SuAnimate?

Well I'm left a little confused about just what the length and angle snapping are and what can and can't be turned off. Gai says the length snapping can be turned off. That would be by the radio button at "Enable Length Snapping"? If so, there's also a radio button at "Enable Angle Snapping"--can it be toggled off? The way I first read Solo's advice was to leave them enabled but to make the distances in the "Precision" and "Enable" boxes very small--like 1/64"--the reasoning being that the inference meddler in the background would allow more choices of points for a given space.

That helps, thanks. I guess in general the more you zoom in the more you can control points you wish placed away from inference attractors. Sticky!

Can someone tell me how to turn off inferencing? I'm just trying to digitize geometry over a scanned image and it's hendering--not helping!

I'm calling this model complete for the present. I have a somewhat decent animation ready to go for my meeting next week and the folks I've shown it to are very excited about the use of SU. We will see if the suits are too. I want like to thank every one of you who helped me stumble along in the dark! Man there is still so much to learn.

I still have questions, though, and for this one I'm not holding out much hope that the ruby will exist--but here it is: Consider the attached illustration of 3 TIN surfaces I would typically Cloud-import into SU. The middle, horizontal(ish) one is supposed to connect to the near-vertical ones on either side. My software that creates and exports the horizontal one won't export it connected--it will always fall a little short of touching the side ones--much less extending them beyond so I intersect-with-model and trim away to create my "cliff edges" (you guys have seen what I'm doing*). For the construction of the model I've just finished I manually extended each and every one of these boogers by creating geometry largely with the protractor guideline tool and pencil--it worked but is time-consuming. The question is, has anybody written something to automate this? It would be something like "extend edges of a group" and would look at the geometric attitude of each triangle along perimeter and project that out away a distance specified by the user.

I'm not holding my breath but I thought I'd ask.

*A thousand+ of you?

I would like to hear about that linking too, David. That would be pretty slick.

Thanks James and Chris. Yes I found your instructional, Chris, and found it helpful. What i really need is more general information about the dem file format. I have yet to get one to load in SU. Tried to download and use the one from your tutorial but it bogged my machine down (and it's a pretty powerful workstation--but that may be an issue with my local Windows and Linux network). Found another dem sample and downloaded it and an asci txt file of the same. I can see on the text file it is ncols 358 and nrows 468. That's 167544 "points" right (SU is asking for "points")? I could not get it to load either--zero division errors or something.

What I'll be doing, if successful, is transforming flat asci files with three columns containing an x, y, and z (elevation) for every sample point into a "dem" file that SU will accept. Actual reference to real space--x and y earth coords--are not important to me, but if it works out that they are easy to keep then I'll keep them.

Yes it will be like importing several of these stacked, terrain-like dem surfaces into SU, as well as a few that are also non-coplanar but near-vertical. Display them all and probably do an Intersect Model to establish the intersecting edges between them. Then I will probably cut away perimeter pieces to expose the inside. The attached shot of work by a commercial supplier of these sorts of illustrations will give you an idea of what I am talking about. The texturing of the rock in their illustrations is not immediately important to me.

Oops forgot the files.

Gone. gone...