There is a (good, with reservations) ruby program called "simplebeam.rb". It provides a dialogue box for you to input the size of your piece of lumber or plywood. I have used it and I like using it. There are several things to remember with this program: You have to go in and change the centimeters to inches inside the text portion of the ruby, that is if you use inches. The program has a major flaw, after you create one component with the program, if you wish to alter any component or one created by the simplebeam ruby you get 3 error boxes when you right click on any component. I have used this ruby, and then disabled it when I am done. I have tried to look at the innards of this ruby to find the cause of the errors, but being a ruby newby I could not find the flaw. I hope that someone repairs this ruby, because it is most useful. Best,

I am running vista and when I "save target as" the link for the plugin it when to a compatibilities file. I relocated to the plugins folder but the ruby doesn't load when SU is re-opened. Thomas

Thank you.

There are two ways actually.One would be with background watermarks (you can add this under Window > Styles > In model> Edit tab > Watermark settings) or use a sky dome which is practically a big dome of modelle geometry and painted with a hemispherical sky.

Hi Chuck, Withnthe Shift key pressed, you can add/distract any entities to/from your selection so if you have a bunch of plants,use the Shift+Select to select them all then the Ctrl+Move to make copies. You should be able to fill in ares with the textures in the Material browser but first you need to enclose a specific face (to be painted) with edges. The odd mouse behaviour may be due to some harware/software problems. What video card do you have?