@sdmitch said: So where are my 3 bucks The check is in the mail. Trust me

@hellnbak said: Dam, you are good! That did the trick! Just a WAG. @hellnbak said: Many thanks, now I can go out for coffee and work on this beast. Coffee at this time of the day? You'll be up all night. @hellnbak said: I'm gonna dance at your next wedding I'll make sure to keep a tabled cleared off for you.

And I hate beer.

@hornoxx said: @dave r said: ...Then drag the thumbnail for the In Model texture to the secondary pane. Presto! Material saved. hey Dave - great and thank you !!! This is a "Duh!" thread information to me! The same thing works for styles and components, too.

@unknownuser said: For whatever reason some of my materials have been renamed. The names show up correctly when I hover over them, but when I select them the names have been changed. In my greys this has happened to four of them. I think you have those four materials already in the model, but you just somehow renamed them. Because if you have a renamed color in the model, when you hover over the color in the colors palette the name you see is the "original one", but when you click on it you see the name you assigned to that color in the model. This happens with all the materials. You can also spot that noticing the little white triangle on the icons.

Peter, Somehow, I missed your reply. Thanks for the explanation. I have some pretty minimal settings that I use for generic tune-up purposes. For me, it has served as an enhanced find and fix errors utility that has saved more than one of my models. But your points are well made and well taken. Thanks again. Phillip

@driven said: are Preview Pane and Thumbnails turned on in the Windows Explorer? john Sorry, been very busy. No, I did not have Preview Pane turned on, but I never do. Turning it on made no difference. And, yes, thumbnails were turned on. Finally resorted to the old standby, Mystic Thumbs. Price has gone up a bit since I used it last, but it does the job. I've decided to keep Win 8. It's kinda interesting, something different. I am going to replace the SSD and HD with better ones though. Overall, this new laptop is amazing. It was touted as a desktop replacement, and I believe it. Kinda silly for me though, I only use it when I go out for coffee.

@hellnbak said: I followed your instructions and it seems to be working fine now. Not sure why it stopped working before. Although I suspect your advice about designing the component on a face and not on a group or component may have something to do with it. When you create a component, pay attention to the various option boxes in the dialog. If you created the component geometry inset on an adjacent face, the "glue to" behavior will get automatically set to "any" unless you set it to "none". Conversely, if you draw on a group or component, the glue to will be set to "none" unless you change it.

@krisidious said: I could have sworn this was telling what size the images were... Sorry hellnbak... Not a problem, not at all. Heck, I read through the thread describing the thing and I thought the same thing. Very confusing.

Everything is working nicely now, thanks for the help and suggestions. I installed 8 first, then 2015. I can just double click on a model if I want to open it in 8 (I still save all my work as 8, for various reasons), or just right click on it and select Open with Sketchup 2015 when I want that. I use my C drive only for the OS and programs, so I wasn't worried about all my Sketchup stuff (actually that's what it's called, Sketchup Stuff, my largest folder, 265GB, 347,927 files, 9,769 folders) or anything else, just some of the stuff on my Desktop. I had some folders there that would have been almost impossible to rebuild from scratch, plus there was my Thunderbird Local Folders file (144 local folders). I was really lucky to find a program that let me recover all that stuff. I guess I was getting complacent, I never had a hard drive crash so completely like this one, I was always able to pretty easily save the files I needed when a drive started going South. Now I include such files in my backup plan. I tried a number of backup programs before I found Syncback Pro, been using it for years now and it works really great. I can setup a new profile in a minute or two. I too use a 1TB WD black for my backups, only connected to the computer when I do my backups. I also regularly backup to my backup computer, which also has a 1TB WD Black which is connected when I do backups. Plus, everything is backed up to my laptop. So I think I'm pretty much covered there. Backups of my backups everywhere. Yeah, I are a bit paranoid. I never have more that one computer connected to the internet at a time, and only when necessary (I only use hard-wired modems and routers, and I have them connected to the AC through remote controlled outlets, so I just click a button to connect to the internet and click again to disconnect, no sense giving the bad guys any more of a target than I have to ) I might give an SSD another try eventually. I've been eying the Samsung 850 Pro 512GB (MZ-7KE512BW), not cheap but looks promising. Maybe I'll just let the technology cook for a couple more years. Anyhow, thanks again for the help. Much appreciated

A web-search for 'vctools' suggests that is a resource often used for hacking. http://www.vctools.net/forum/ So it looks like you have a Virus or Trojan that is trying to latch onto SketchUp as you run it... Luckily the author has made an error in his code and it's failing ! It could have come in from almost anywhere... You need to search for and delete it - the path in the error message is spurious - it's not on your network, but relates to something used when the little bugger was compiled... Use a reputable Anti-virus/SpyWare/Trojan removal app... 'CCleaner' can also be used to tidy up your Temp files and Registry... http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Just a thought, but do you have any abnormally large textures that could be causing issues? Otherwise, I'd say delete things until the weirdness stops (in a backup obviously), add things back in until it starts, and try to diagnose it that way. As for why it's fine in a new model, I'd say perhaps the issue is within a group/component and doesn't kick off until it's accessed?

For that scene you can also adjust the light/dark settings in the Shadows window. This will however also affect the shadows on the robot. The curve in one instance gives a nice graduated backdrop, but in the case of the side shot, maybe a flat face is better or curved opposite? (You don't have to use the same object as backdrop in each scene.) The shading feature makes many SU renderings work great and is also good for modelling interface but causes issues, for example when we want to show an elevation of a building and the roof, ground, or ceiling becomes super dark.

This work is golden! Keep on keepin' on. Happy new place! Happy Holidays!

@rich o brien said: Windows XP. The greatest OS ever. Yeah, I figured that's what you meant, just couldn't understand why you thought it would still be a popular download. Yes, it was a great OS, I still have it on two of my machines (just because of the software I can't run on Win7), but since the security updates stopped it's become very risky to go online with. I was very reluctant to move on to Win7 but so glad I did. It has (IMHO) replaced XP as the greatest OS to date.

The ratchet is the pump mechanism, you turn the handle and it winds the bar up to move the piston. Rack and pinion. Another version here. http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/20933/lot/92/

Yes this has been around since the @last days. I only come across it when I've inserted a siteplan or similar from AutoCad. It used to be reported as a bug a lot, but I guess it's been grandfathered in as something that can't be fixed? Or maybe it just keeps being put on the "next time" list.

@hellnbak said: ......., and since I never had the plugin installed before I would really like to know how that feature got turned on in the first place....... Even if you never had 'Solar North' installed on your computer, you could stiil be stuck with that orange line in your model. That is when downloading a model with the line activated (and maybe rotated to the new solar north). It may sound silly but yes, that's the way it happens. The way to get rid of it is to have someone re-upload the same model without orange solar north for you to download, or to install the plugin yourself. p.s. I found this out myself some 6 years ago, not knowing that there was the possibility to set/adjust north. I had just begun with SketchUp. Someone "gave" me a model to work on.

Beautiful! Well done! The undercarriage detail is incredible.