@alan fraser said:

I think they'll need to completely rewrite the whole mapping system before SU has anything that's approaching professional level.

I can't imagine Google would fund something like that. Frankly, I regard EVERY release of SU as an act of charity by Google... I just cannot see how it fits anymore into any aspect of the company in any meaningful way -- street view changed everything.

All that said, let me add how grateful I am for these many acts of charity -- they are appreciated and for as long as they continue, one can hope for better UV features.

@tig said:

OK, further testing.
Irrespective of the 'beak-edges' settings... an edge drawn from within a circle that passes through a segments' vertex of that circle will break in two. BUT if 'break-edges' is set to 'false' the new edge will NOT break IF it crosses a segment anywhere other than at a vertex !

And that's a problem for me and a bug for Google to fix.

What I'm doing is setting up a follow me along an arc. The arc length is always in whole degrees and the segments of the extrusion must also be whole degrees. Now at first thought you might say "So what's the problem with breaking the line then?" and while that's a fair question the answer is this: The follow me extrusion along an arc begins and ends by twisting the profile face -- the edges closest to the centerpoint of the arc twist outwards so the total length along the arc is long and those furthest from the center point twist inward and so are too short. I have to fix both ends to get the correct dimensions. IMO a very serious bug. On the extruded end I extrude for a greater length than needed and then go back and trim the excess. The broken lines across the arc is where the trim is going to be. Back at the profile face I have to set it up so the face has depth behind it and I use the end points of the two sides to figure out how to fix that end.

The entire set of manual fixes are: The extrusion has 20 faces so that's... umm, what... 22 lines to fix where the face starts... the broken line across the arc... setting up a face along the broken line to use for the intersect... drawing another line further along the arc than needed so the extrusion goes past the intersect face... doing the intersect selected for the extrusion and the trim face... and all cleanup of the stuff I entered but no longer need. Can you say STUPID MAKE WORK SOFTWARE? I can.

I'd complain bitterly to Google if I was using the pro software but as I'm not I deal with it as best I can.

@tig said:

PS: having breaking edges 'off' on my PC does NOT result in any edges or curves intersecting/breaking when drawn over each other - e.g. a line drawn across a circle in the same plane remains intact... unless you then select it and use intersect with model when it breaks at any intersections...

It alwaysbreaks for me, no matter what. See below:

![step 1: issue ruby command
step 2 draw a circle
step 3 draw a line across the edge of the circle

Note break.](/uploads/imported_attachments/jImL_Clipboard00.jpg "step 1: issue ruby command
step 2 draw a circle
step 3 draw a line across the edge of the circle

Note break.")

Thank you... the first one does all that I need. Very much appreciated.

I'd like to salvage my shortcuts from an earlier version and apply them to the latest... no idea where they're located (I'm assuming they're recorded in ascii somewhere). Anyone know where google hides our shortcuts?

I find I use 1/2 to 3/4 of the icons in any of the standard Google-provided toolbars and feel the other icons are simply clutter. Most software has been providing the means to do that since, oh, Windows 3.1 and it's a surprise to me that in 2012 SU doesn't appear to let one to do that. So is there a simple way to customize which icons appear and which don't?

After issuing the command Sketchup.break_edges=false I noticed lines will still break when crossing the line of a circle (but remain whole while crossing a straight line). I expected the line of the circle to remain whole.

FWIW, it would be awfully nice of google to put a break_edges (on | off) into the preferences page so it can be turned off ONCE per version instead of every session.

VERY useful! My thanks for producing and releasing this.

Might you consider adding "Remove Materials" from Backface? I know it's in another plugin but it's something I should do as part of my final cleanup but I often forget. Adding this would to Cleanup would be real handy and I would like to see the count of cleaned backfaces in the statistics too.

P.S.
Ya know, adding "Remove Untextured Faces" would be a godsend for me. Any chance of that too?

Might as well toss my two cents in... some useful, basic changes that are long overdue:

• Select front faces that have no material.
• Put Sketchup.break_edges= true | false into preferences. I almost always have it set to false and typing that into the ruby window each and every time I start is a PITA.
• When rotating a material, please, please, let me type the numeric value. You do it with the rotate tool... why not here as well?
• Give us the means to color the endpoint pixels differently from the line itself. They can be very hard to see in many circumstances.
• Let me define a shortcut for texture rotation.

I recently downloaded a Ruby script that does twisting and bending... works pretty well. But on the task I was dealing with I did not like the results. Just on a lark, I selected the top face of a tall cube, selected bounding edges, and placed the rotate tool on the center of the face. I then rotated that face 90d.

The result was identical to what the Ruby Script does for twisting.

Continuing to play around: select face, bounding edges, move tool... I found I could bend the tall cube too.

I switched to the scale tool, working again with just the top face. Made a wedge... and then a Pyramid.

Yeah... I have the script and it does those things and more. But that's not my point. What I want to get across is that I've been using SU for several years now and I have to say I really, really like it when software is so DEEP as to keep revealing useful functionality after I thought I knew it pretty well.

Good stuff.

Thanks for the lead.

I'll follow the advice and see if I can work around the "features" of the software.

Is there any way to prevent SU from clipping the poly face when you zoom in close? The software allows precision to 1/64" of an inch... why can't I get close enough to see that distance w/o the faces and edges disappearing?

I've never understood why the texture object wasn't manipulated as-if it were a polyface. Stick the rotate tool on a corner, start to rotate it, stop, type in the real number you want. Done. Would save me plenty of time.

The paint bucket should locate the red pin of a texture in the same manner as the pencil locates a line -- where you click it. For myself, that would often be on a vertex where I would hope the paint tool would be as smart as the pencil tool and infer I mean a snap-to.

Two more very specific suggestions:

There are times where I take a component in a model and rotate it for use in another situation. Because the axis of the component instance also rotates. I have many situations where that's not acceptable, so I have to explode the new instance and make a new component under a new name. It would be far easier if there was a function I could use that reoriented the component axis to the same as the whole model -- the move axis feature is far too cumbersome... I simply want a single click - bang - it's done solution.

The other one is about textures (again). This morning I'm orienting textures along an arc'd surface... many polys, each of which requires a rotation AND positioning the red pin on a vertex. Now if these were poly faces I could easily grab a bunch and move them but textures have to be done one by one. So how about letting me highlight multiple textures-on-faces and let me move them all at the same time? The ideal would include another function to snap red pin to nearest vertex.

One more basic feature that could be added: Why can't I type the rotation value when rotating a texture? Or the distance value when moving it or stretching it? It's just another object and should be open to manipulation by all of the basic commands.

With each release I'm always surprised and disappointed that some basic improvements to texture manipulation are not included... small things like letting me create a shortcut for rotate texture 90d or adding a preference that lets me choose texture by texture the default location of the "red pin" -- is it going to be the center of the poly or at a vertex over on the lower left corner? Depending on the material it's always one or the other and right now it's a PITA when it's always some corner vertex.

How about letting me pick a color for all endpoints -- just the endpoints -- as black on anything really dark is almost impossible to see... or the colors of lines within a component. Show line color for "this" axis only would be useful too. Those are just object attributes, not rocket science.

How about select by material when a material has not yet been assigned? Can't be too hard to do....

Last two, probably a bit more difficult :

1. let me select a bunch of faces and when applying a texture, let me choose whether I want the texture applied individually to each face as-if I was doing them one by one (the way it's done now,everything is relative to the face) OR as a collective set where the red pin for each face has identical xyz values (i.e., where there is one absolute point for the set and all faces have their texture start from there).

2. Think stone arch bridge: Texturing multiple faces that follow the vertical faces above an arch is quite painful so how about a texture follow-me?

@shura said:

Hello Dave,

Can you post a screenshot as an example? Maybe it's my english, but I don't fully understand your description.

alex

I've attached an example of a finished model.

What I'm saying is after breaking up the road surface into smaller sections, sometimes when texturing the stripe is aligned to the curve, just as you see here, and in another, similar model, each section has the stripe aligned to the green axis.

I was wondering (1) has anyone else noticed this and (2) does anyone know how to force the curve-alignment to happen?

As far as my work procedure goes, I usually do a short follow-me from a master profile, texture and position just a few sections of the model, group them, and then copy, paste in place, and then rotate the group from the center point of the road radius, repeating as many times as I need to acheive the length I want. It works well enough.

I'm just curious about why SU acts differently with the same sort of problem in different models.

I do a lot of models that include adding non-tiling textures to an arc'd surface -- a curved section of road fer instance. I've learned that in order to texture these sort of model properly I need to cut up each arc'd surface by adding an edge at right angles to the end points that form the outer edges, thereby making a number of individual quads to texture. Anyway, something the odd I've noticed: sometimes when applying the texture to these quads, the texture alignment is along the arc and at other times the alignment is along one of the axis on the model. In the first case all I need to do is shove the texture to its final position, in the other case I have to apply a rotation before moving it.

Does anyone know why the behavior is not consistent and / or is there a way to ensure the texture always aligns along the arc?

@danbig said:

@xrok1 said:

i think the biggest duh moment of all that everbody (hopfully) goes through is realizing that it matters which way the faces are oriented.

90% of the 3dwarehouse posters still havn't had that duh moment.

...ok, I'd better ask, because my mind is blank after reading this.

What do you mean, "it matters which way the faces are oriented"?

This is either something I know, in different terms, or something I don't know at all.

If you export SU models to other software that undestands cad models the "light colored" face is regarded as the surface normal -- an odd phase in itself -- but what that means is that face will change it's appearance per the intensity of the light plus angle of the surface normal relative to the light source whereas the reverse face -- the "dark one" -- does nothing. IOW, any kind of add'l rendering depends upon setting face orientation correctly.

@jaxcoffee said:

Has anyone else used this type of resource to model from? It would be interesting to see if any history has been modeled from this type of information, don't you think?

Modeling from Sanborn maps is pretty much what I do. I have a San Jose library card which gives me access to the California maps and at various times I've had access to NC, UT, MT, and NY maps as well.

I've found that it helps a whole lot if the building is still extant and can be seen in birdeye's view in MS Bing. Sometimes Google street view is clear enough to also be useful but a lot of times the Bing images is good enough.

Do you have any question's in particular?