No idea yet?

It would really be important for the export of my project.

All objects are only imported onto a layer each object is placed on.

Eg. a group with five subgroups is on layer 1. But each subgroup is still on layer 0. The imported result would be that all objects are on layer 0 still...

Things like this always happen when it's getting time critical.. i'd be really thankful for any tip.

I don't know about Maxwell but it seems to be a bit tricky.

Searched Sketchucation and found: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=44406

Maybe that helps. Good luck.

I have lots of subgroups and subsubgroups in my groups which need to be on the same layer as the "top-group" layer.

Any way to achieve that? It's a killing task to do it by hand with outliner..

Hi,

I leave all geometry on layer 0 and just put groups to layers (as i learned that last time)
but i need to put subgroups of groups / components to a specific layer as well..

Any advice?

Maybe i'm just too blind to see

@unknownuser said:

I guess different strokes for different folks.

True.

I' always open to change my way of working, so may i ask how (roughly) you do work?

The difference between the Intuos4 and 5 is just the optional touch capability (and optional wireless extension), right?
I don't really like the buttons on the side of the tablet, they work but could be better.

Anyway, you have set the buttons on the side to match the mouse buttons i guess? But you need to use two hands to orbit and zoom etc.?

Where do you think is the benefit of using the tablet instead of the mouse (beside no having the pain from using a mouse too long)?

Nice topic!

I have a Space Navigator as well but don't use it too much in SU as orbiting with the mouse works better to me.
I just use it sometimes when i want to fly around a bit to "feel" the design.
It was almost obsolete for a while- but for using 3ds Max it's essential to me.

One big thing to mention about using Space Navigator is that it speeds up the viewport, flying around is way more fluid than with native tools.

And my mouse-hand is really aching after a long working time as well, probably we all know that

I own a Intuos4 M as well.
I had a Intuos2 L (or XL?) before which was about the size of my monitor- and way(!) too big.
I rarely did use it (the big one)- and btw. it took too much space on my desk.

Therefor i decided to go for the M size which i think is the best.
The active area is big enough to make nice drawings and sketches-
and as it's mapped to the screen (active size is mapped to screen size) and has a high precision you get used to it very quick.
If the size would be bigger, it would be a really hard task to move the cursor from downleft to upright, you probably don't want that for long.

About the touch function of an Intuos5: i probably had taken this one if it was one the market when i bought my one..
but i tried the bamboo touch by that time- and it was not good. The multitouch responsive was very poor and clumsy.
Check that before you buy, if it's not working fluidly, it's not making that much sense.

Anyway, i (as Dave said as well) don't use my tablet for SU, for me there's no sense for that.
(Man, you own a Cintiq 21... rooar..)
Only once in a while when you want to freehand-draw something.
Or maybe if you have Artisan you can use it for sculpting.

It does make sense for Photoshop and such (really) and other programs which make use of the pressure sensitivity.

I hope there was some info of value for you.

Ok, i produced some misunderstanding

Sure your tools are accurate and therefor really handy.

But- if you could shift some textures (e.g. planks of a wooden floor) slightly and manually (approximately) with ease (with a tool), that would be great.

Like in the wooden floor example:

• some planks just don't look good where they were placed randomly or
• are randomized in a way that some by chance look repetitive again or
• the edge of a texture is visible

then you'd just want to shift them a bit.

TIG,

i know about your other plugin as it came across my way during my search today.

It's handy for sure.
And it's great to get over the problem of rotating a texture but not scaling it.
But it doesn't seem to do what i was looking for -> a simple moving of a face's texture.
And i'd have to do several clicks or entering numbers to use it.
This does make sense if you need it, but not in this case.

I mean, i can select a face, use context-menu > texture > position > move texture.
But doing this for each face sums up quite quick to an annoying process.

Therefor a one-click-solution would be really handy, don't you think?

Ok TIG,

i'm close to say i love you- but i don't

That's something i was thinking of for really a long time as it's a major improvement!!
I was just searching today before posting a request for that

Would really be worth an icon in the toolbar!

Additionally, it would be great to have something like a TextureMover tool which:

• highlights the face when you hover over it
• when you keep the mouse button pressed you see the texture like in the texture editing mode and
• your able just to move the texture really easy

It happens quite often that the texture is not in the right place or you have an edge of a non-tiled texture which you want to move aside.
Maybe with an icon at the cursortop like this: (ok, it's really simple)

The extension to randomize HUE, saturation and gamma would for sure be great but it's understandable that it's not that easy to implement.
It would rise the filesize very much as every texture will be resaved several times.
Maybe there will be something like this one day.
(In case of rendering there could be an option like MultiTexture for 3dsMax but that's of minor importance here)

--

I can't believe i missed that..

There should be something like a sticky "Brand New Must Have Plugin" Post where such plugins are posted- and if you missed one or were not in the forums for a while it would be really great so see what has happend during the last days, something you really don't want to miss
Maybe just one post each plugin with a link to each topic.
It would make sense if it was in reversed order, like first post is always the latest..
Ok, maybe it'd need some improvement but you get what i mean, i guess.

Anyway, thanks TIG

Looks not too bad

• the plants in the foreground should be better quality, have better shadows (at least the strange tree down left), not have flowers around their trunk, try to merge them better to the green (later in PS)
• think of if you really want to have these plants there as is look a little arbitrarily (like one little leftover conifer next to the palm and such )
  (as it's te foreground it's of much importance to have sth. good there- or just leave it nice lawn with eg. some shrubs to the right)
• leave that wall on the right side if it's not part of the concept and add background to the left and the right
• desharpen edges (eg. of the canopy corner) with bevel plugin, they are too sharp
• the sacling of the woman to the right is incorrect i guess
• use an AO (ambient occlusion) pass from Vray to add later in PS
• render a MaterialID pass to better select certain areas in PS (glass facade, street, lawn) and add textures multiplied or set to transparent to these areas in PS
  (adds realism, varity, give little dirt to certain areas eg. like where the pillar meets the ground)
• i personally would leave that glow around the building
• don't use such a strong green in the lawn as you want to draw attention to the building
• rotate the palms to have variation
• desaturate the very blue sky a bit to smooth it little
• other good critics already mentioned

Good textures can be found at cgtextures.com

Good luck

@tig said:

OR type 6.789m and the total dimension along that axis will become 6.789 meters, because you can input dimensions as well as scaling ratios...

Another 'duh' for me.. (shakes head)

I personally draw sketchy when designing even though i try to keep correct dimensions.
After the concept is mainly done i redraw the project (or parts of it) to have a clear and correct drawing.
If you have the correct dimensions, a drawing is quite quickly done, quicker than correcting a bad one.

Anyway, to combine Peter's and TIG methods you could do it like this:

Correct me, if i'm wrong.

(if you know the distance you want to move the outer line it's easier to use just the move tool, but if you just know the overall distance, it would do the trick)

@brookefox said:

Here I think the issue is that you don't hold ctrl down, just click it to engage the copy, then you can click a start point and input the distance.

No, no, if that would be the case, the adjacent faces of these lines would be moved downwards as well.
It happens to me quite often.
I surely can say it's not the Ctrl key..

If i do the action described above and nothing happens, i can do it as often as i want to, it will just not do it- only by Ctrl+moving without typing the distance it snaps to the distance i typed in before (when it did not copy the lines).

Maybe, as i assumed, it has to do with the same reason why SU does not cut faces even if it could / should / sometimes just doesn't.

Hm, using "make faces 1.1" on this could work- i'll give it a try next time! Good idea.

And you're right, a strange behavior like this not being a bug but just depending on SUs mood..

--

And there's this other one (i'm not starting another thread as we all know this one as well and i don't want to blame me

The "copy line along a set distance does not copy anything"-"bug".

Lets say i have a chimney and i select the upper inner lines because i want them to be copied down 20cm.
I select move, drag i down while pressing Ctrl and set the distance 20cm.
Then nothing happens.
I have to reselect the lines and drag them down pressed Ctrl until it snaps the distance of 20cm.
Happens quite often as well..
..i'm used to it and can live with it, but it's a strange thing as well..

Probably it's me again and it's the same explanation for this, but it should be solved as well.

At least i cannot help you with your question before as it would be just a shot in the dark as long as i don't know your render engine.

--

For your actual question- sure, there are programs and solutions for almost everything out there.
I'm not much using animation rendering in SU.
There are some free and some commercial plugins which aid you creating animations in SU and therefor render them after.
Just search the plugins index, you'll find a lot.

You can even use the native SU pages to get a nice animation if you set some scenes and turn the scene delay down to 0.

I don't know if it's possible to set a camera target in SU.
You can set a camera to follow a path and there is also a way to make a turntable animation, which could fit your need as well.

For creating an animated gif just search google, there are many.
If you have photoshop, use this.

You can think about creating a thread of how to create your animation, but please make sure you clearly point out what shall be the goal
and use the search function before- as this probably has been treated here in the forums before.
And try to use a clear discription title (eg. "Turntable Animation" or whatever).

Thanks for explaining, Gai.

@gaieus said:

And when it does not, that's the most annoying part of modelling

Very true

Too bad it happens quite often.
To create certain objects of division of faces you can't get over doing it in a way which does not produce this "buggy problem".
Like i build up some geoemtry there and some there and then merge it- or even boolean function and plugins left me with such problems.
I spent lots of time already "cleaning up" unmerged faces by redrawing lines as intersecting does not work for me in most cases.

It's ok if there are not too many faces to redraw, but very often your left with lots of geometry where you just can say "aargh, this *** sketchup"..
True or not?

Even though it's well known and there's somehow a reason for it, i'd consider it a lack as well.

Because SU doing something sometimes and you're just lucky if it doesn't is not a really good base- and it's limiting the user.

Do you see a chance that this will be changed in future updates or releases?

Until then thanks for the "profiles-tip", i always have profiles visibility turned off to increase viewport speed and better visibility.
I forgot that thick profiles are visible on faces if they are not merged..

Have a nice weekend!

EDIT Hm, maybe a task for the plugin masters..

Hi,

this is my first bug report and i'm reporting a bug which probably most of you know of.

If it's not a bug and if there's a solution to this, the better.

Eg.

• you want copy a bunch of faces onto a surface to get this face subdivided
• you put some elements which have coplanar faces onto each other

and it happens that if you select a face (what should select this face only) a whole bunch of faces is selected, even though they are divided by lines.
The only way to solve that is to trace at least one line of each face again which "splits" this face from the others.

I think you know of that issue, if not i did explain it incomprehensibly..

I could just reproduce a little example of this problem but it happens quite often and is very(!) annoying..

..or maybe another application developer would realize sketchup's potential and adopt it's ease (and all other good things about SU, some mentioned already, to add accurancy and being almost perfect for architectural sketching and even developing) into their program.

Like 3ds's graphite modeling tools or Autodesk's 123D. (Still far away)

Even if it would be sad to leave SU.. i probably would

I hope SU stays in the race.

Maybe we should sign a petition to google..
They (it) could reign the 3D world as well.

In addition to the mentioned ways of handling complex scenes:

use a low poly component as placeholder, eg. a cylinder for a tree, one for each component you will use later. You can scale and rotate and this information will be kept.
Use random selection of a set of components to generate eg. a forest.

After you set up a certain scene you can go to component library, select the placeholder, select component instances and then select "replace selected". (right click on high poly component)

That way you can make a big scene and handle it in viewport and replace it with high poly objects later. Keep im mind to set the pivot correctly within the components as these will be inserted there.

Definitely for handling bigger scenes in SU a good computer is a must.

Importing big files can be tricky, import files in parts, if possible.

The same for big automatised functions, using plugins.
Sometimes it's just better to use it on parts, not all at once.

And never forget to save before you do a critical action

It depends on the render engine you use.

Give as much as precise information as possible and you will be helped

Probably it's the color mapping.