Here's a little update. I picked up the project again after having some free time...

Here is an external shot of the decks I have done...

The second picture I have here is an x-ray view. I try my best to get the windows to line up with the rooms below. You can actually stand in the room and look out through the glass.

Here is the control tower inside Hangar Bay 1. I still have to make a floor for deck 4, but you can see it's a neat looking structure we never saw in the show.

These windows are going to be the death of me...

One of the more irritating bugs I've found with Sketchup is that when I hide a layer, the program still interacts with the hidden geometry. I guess that there is supposed to be some kind of philosophy behind it, but it doesn't make much sense to me. The idea is that when I'm hiding the geometry I'm hiding it for a reason.

Let me give you an simple example...

Here a building I have created that is bisected in the middle...

Now for my next trick, I make two layers... "Floor 1" and "Floor 2" and I send the bottom geometry to "Floor 1"

I now move My top geometry to "Floor 2" and this is where it starts to get wierd. I want to to notice that there are 3 types of selectoids in the layer dialog box (Radio button, check box, and highlight) ... I will get back to that later...

Now the problem. When I try and draw geometry on the second floor, the first floor is interfering with it after I explicitly hit it.

This causes all kinds of problems such as edges migrating to hidden layers, the eraser tool "picking up" on hidden edges, and my inability to make surfaces as parts were "hidden". What irks me the most is the edge that this program is complaining about is actually on Floor 2. I can see it's right there! That's broken...

Also, why does the layer dialog have three selectors? The highlight selector serves no purpose other than not allowing me to delete layer 0 (for some odd reason). I can't tell you how many times I've done a floor, only to find that I was drawing the level in the wrong layer and now I have to move the whole thing (of course the lines that are "hidden" or "smoothed" don't go, and I have to show hidden geometry to get those too! You would think selecting something would also select the hidden geometry too on the same layer.

Here is a proper Layer dialog box

Here the highlight is what you are drawing on, eyeball is what you see. It's pretty straightforward. I can also make layers opaque, would would be awesome too.

I guess the upshot is how do you guys get around the whole layer thing. Not using the layer system is completely impracticable for me because my object I'm building is huge. I'm only on floor 3 out of 24 if I turn on more than two floors at a time, my system screeches to a halt and updates the screen about once every three seconds. (Heaven forbid I accidentally select "select all connected", which also, strangely jumps layers too

That's my rant I guess... Go head and flame away

The problem is when I got it to scale, that's when everything got touchy. When I was just on the 1st Deck, it was awesome, but I have templates for the whole ship now and it's huge. I'm thinking that's it.

I may just keep the doors open. When I'm done I want to export this so anyone can turn the model into anything they want. If you have dynamic objects they wont work if you convert it to, say, a half life map file. (You will have to delete and recreate several thousand doors. Right now for some reason you can't even walk around properly because the "walk" camera is so touchy. I wish there was an option to turn that down, or to add WASD keys to move.

Each is a comp onto themselves. I'm endlessly tweaking them. There are the "rough drafts", but the cool thing is that when of mess with one, you mess with all of them. When they are placed and fitted, I'll get all the sides right (Messing with one causes all of them to change) A good example is the "door" comp that is just an open hole. I can add the two sides and every doorway gets the upgrade.

Ugh! I'm grinding now. There are a lot of comps to make.

More misc comps, I need these to start building the rooms. The furniture comps are next but I'll just probably nick those from the warehouse.

More comps, I'm calling it a night tonight.

There is an issue where I'm running into scale problems. The actual lifeboat is 4 meters wide, and matches the plans I have, however, with the room it sits in, there is a bit of a clearance issue as they don't fit in a deck! However, the original model shows a bit of relief for the lifeboat hatches and so I'm chalking it up to "close enough".

Awww, I'm trying to be lazy about it. When you have ~400 components on a level, replacing all the text can be kind of a chore. I'll just plop them down after I do the mirror function.

Ok, On the ship I'm building, it's very symmetric so What I do on the right side is repeatable on the left with a quick mirror. The problem I'm having is that when I mirror a component, it's reversed on the other side. Now this isn't much of a problem except that I wish to add text to my components. I think you know what happens here, my text gets reversed. Not only this, because when you fix one component, you fix all of them, making them correct on one side flips the other.

Anyone have some creative solutions for this? Locking the text object doesn't help. (I didn't think it would but gave it a shot for experiment's sake) attached is a picture with an example.

I forgot to post the ship!

Here you can see the lifeboats in the X-ray view and how the poke out the ship. You can also see into the ship from the windows now. Speaking of windows, now that I look at it, I should be putting glass in them.... What do you guys think?

Here's a little update, because the ship is modular, you can easily fill space with components. The cool thing is that ship parts can be knocked out in as little as 2-5 minutes. I'm making the internal parts now and I thought I would share. I can share the components template if anyone wants to help generate these parts. They are super-simple to make. They are nice and ambiguous and require a touch of imagination.

I know this is odd as I always have strange unrelated issues. It just the tend to bug me until I can post here.
How do you make a Material that is clear on one side and solid on the other? I've seen them on ceilings so you can look inside and yet walk around inside the model without looking at the sky.

I guess this is slightly related, my walk camera a hyper-sensitive, and bounces against things that are not there. How do you make it calm down?

Ah, I see.

My use of layers is being used from a CPU standpoint. When this model gets big, I need to visually separate the floors so my computer isn't killing itself rendering the scene.

Say like I make a new floor. I'll check Zero to see if it's clean. Then I make a new layer, switch to it and import a floorplan picture. I then turn on the floor plan picture of the layer previous, turn on x-ray and align the floors. Then the old floor is turned off. Now I make a new layer, switch to that, and trace out the floor. After I'm done, I turn off the floorplan picture and do a push-pull to make my floor 3D. I do not make component-ize this as I need it to stay "fluid" while I put in components such as rooms. After I import a room component, I make it unique, and intersect it with the current visible layer. Then I cut holes in the floor plan and the room component for the door and then intersect for windows. (The windows and doors cut through multiple components in different places, making a single "door" component impracticable. Sketchup has no CSG functions) After my floor and rooms have been "carved" I then make the floor a component, turn off all visible layers, go to Layer Zero, clean up, and move to the next floor.

It works for me. I know I'm dragging nails across the chalkboard for some. I haven't run across a problem yet. The simple rules are NEVER have anything selected when you switch layers and be hyper-aware of what is the layer you are working on. As my workflow is methodical, I have to set the "scene" before I work and layer selection is done before the pen is dropped on the model.

I liken it to when the spreadsheet "Visicalc" first came out and people used it to make lists. The next version of Visicalc was explicitly designed so that making lists was difficult (It was not "designed" to do that). There is a reason we all use Excel now.

If I'm using the program wrong, so be it. It doesn't seem to damage my workflow at all. The only real problem is that I can't make a component that can "cut" across multiple components or layers of geometry, and have to rely on intersections and clean-up. That's just a limitation of Sketchup and not layer related.

Ok, I see.
I'm using layers in Sketchup like layers in Photoshop. I'm most likely going to have over 100 layers when I'm done. Layer Zero is actually empty, and when I go there and see geometry, something is wrong.

I'm building a 22 story structure. Each floor has a "Print" layer where I import a png with the floorplan that I trace out. the next is a "skin" layer for each floor that shows external geometry. There is a "floor" layer which is all the internal rooms. "Elevator" is just the elevator shafts. Then each floor has an extra layer for experiments and such.

so we have 22 x print + skin + floor + elevator + extra = 110 layers at least, barring any odd things like components.

Never mind, you right click on the entity and select "entity info" and change it there.

Still wondering about renaming Layer Zero. Another thing though... What exactly does "explode" do besides flip all my paint to the outside of my model?

Ok, I have some geometry that is more appropriate in another layer how do I move the polygons/lines/points to another layer....

On a related note, is there a way to rename Layer Zero?

The plans are freely downloadable. They were done by Ed Whitefire under the supervision of Andrew Probert. The "Official" plans were done by Mike Okuda. I own those too, but I like Whitefire's better. Firstly because they are already scanned, but mostly because it's a whole new take on the ship. Also the rooms are "blank" which leaves more to the imagination. I'll be taking from both sets of plans when I make my ship. It will be a nice mix between the two.

You can download the Whitefire plans here...

(www.cloudster.com)

Deck 1 is now done. I now have real windows that look in. It took a while as I had to make a poor-man's CSG boolean component to cut through multiple walls. I should put glass on them, but I'm keen on having them open for now so you can look in. I've started on the upper second deck now.

the first deck is actually a self-contained multi-level platform. The ship is designed so the bridge module can be "swapped out". The upper level of the first deck is the bridge proper and is set a half-level above the lower platform. The second deck is also a two-level platform. This is actually in the ship proper, but a half-deck higher then the rest of the decks

One of the more interesting things is that the window for the captain's ready room actually doesn't poke outside of the ship anywhere.. I had to Munge the skin of the ship a little to accommodate the window.

I'm not making "The Enterprise". This is a unique ship. (NCC-1683) I did this because I tend to fret over very trivial things, and if something doesn't come out just right I can fiddle with it for hours. One of the problems is that this is an imaginary ship, filled with imaginary things made up by different people. Sometimes it's consistent, but often I have to make things up to make it fit. So it's bigger and most likely not the same aspect as the "real" Enterprise. The halls are simplified and largely it's unfurnished. This is My ship. and It feels good that I don't have to adhere strictly to a floor plan or size aspect.

Maybe when I'm done, I'll "rent" the rooms and people can fill them and I'll add that to the ship.

I leave you with a picture of all the floor plan levels stacked semi-transparently. You want to see what a ghost ship looks like?