I'm having a graphics problem w/ SU where, depending on the function I'm trying to perform, get a lot of tearing across the displayed image. It didn't used to be like this... and all of my SU are so effected.

It's supposed to look like this:

But when selecting the measuring tape, it looks like this:

On occasion I also see SU abort w/ a C++ error -- no bug splat.

I suspect this is a video driver problem, perhaps something left over froman earlier rev, but after making several updates, all I see are fewer functions are so effected, not a solution.

I'm using a nVidia 8800 GPU and 175.4 drivers.

Has any seen similar problems? What did you do to ix it?

Well that works a bit too well as it adds the texture to the reverse side of any face in a group or component. I only need to texture the surface normals -- the beige face. The reverse side (blue face) should be left untextured.

Any other ideas?

As for usage, a lot of people who create their own add-on's for games are using SU for creation of scenery objects, buildings mostly, but most any static item fits the bill. For me, that's objects going into Microsoft's Train Simulator. It's an easy to learn 3d cad package ideally suited to such elements but of course once you go there it brings into consideration issues of minimizing the number of verticies, wanting to have LOD's, better animations, and as I indicated, a need to ensure no surface normals are untextured. It's obvious this usage and these topics were not anticipated by the original designers as all of them are pretty much ignored in SU.

p.s. I'm working on a building model right now... it has 90,000 square feet of floor space. I just tracked down an untexted poly that was 0.667 square inches in size. That's the sort of difficultly I'm describing.

The problem for isn't that they lack the correct appearance, it's that I'm exporting the model for use in another environment and its over there that the untextured poly causes a problem. Actually, it's a huge, completely unacceptable problem.

The way it is now, I'm going back and forth between this other environment and SU looking for these things. Sometimes it's just something I missed. More often it's a tiny poly pair created by the inference engine that's hidden insideof what I've built.

I can't find any easy way to find untextured polys. Seems to me the state of being untextured is no different, for select and area functions, than textured polys.

How about making it easier and enable those two functions in the materials window?

I'd be happy if they allowed us to add / remove individual icons from the toolbars. You know, like every other software package has done since the introdution of Windows 2.1

Because the inference engine often creates polys on its own -- often tiny and hard to find polys -- it sure would be handy to be able to select polys that have no textures applied at all, just like you can select textured polys over in the materials window. Just make that function deal check both sides for no texture.

It would also be handy to have a poly select function where the criteria includes a user entered value for area, selecting with one of >=, =, or <= conditions.

As for why these would be good, exports to other tools I use are far less forgiving than SU is WRT wholly untextured and/or tiny polys and trying to find and delete them in SU is very hard to do.

I would like to see several welding points functions:

1 weld together a pair of points that you have selected with the mouse.
2 weld together points that lie within a user specified distance apart.
3 weld (really round up) a pair of co-planar points to a user specfied value on the common axis.

When rotating a material texture, it sure would be nice to be able to specify a numeric value for the degrees of rotation instead of trying to mouse it around. I find myself rotating an object back to a 0/90/180/270 axis to apply a texture and then rotating it back to it's original position. Think of a wooden truss girder on an angle... the grain needs to run the length of the girder on the angle the girder is on, not vertical or horizontal. What a PITA that is to do today.

It would also be very nice for a simple snap-to-point to weld any corner or centerline of the texture to one of the object points. I often have textures where the centerline of the texture needs to snap to the centerline of the object. Hard to get that exact as it is now.

Last request is to ask for a function that'll accept user typed values for distance or degree in order to skew and/or bend to an arc a texture assignment. Consider texturing a curved road: the centerline markings of the road should smoothly follow the same as the centerline of the object, whether the road object is a collection of skewed quadrilaterals or made from arc (or parts of a circle) object. This is hard to do now.