I have seen in several plug-in tutorials by Chris Fullmer, an expanded main toolbar that allows additional plug-ins, etc. ikn a tiered arrangement, that is to say that as one adds new tools, they appear in new horizontal bands below the main one as you fill the previous one up.

Picture attached.

I am MAC based and when I add new tools, the new additions simply move to the right, and are accessed by an arrow at the end of the line, much like what occurs when one surpasses the space that is available for extra scenes. I am limited to one line.

I would like to be able to see and access all of my tools as per the example attached.

Is this a MAC issue or is there a way for me to accomplish this?

Thanks Daniel, unfortunately, Acme doesn't have a MAC platform at this point...and thanks for the Cornucopia tip.

...well, both would be great....animated people in vue would be icing on the cake....animated vehicles would too. I'm primarily doing stills, but motionless people/cars in a walkthrough/flyby are a bit static.

Next question.

Is there a good source for 3D people for use in Vue?

I got Vue bundled with Poser, but to be perfectly honest, I don't have the desire of the Radiosity enthusiasts to learn it and play with costuming them...and obviously the flat face-me people from Sketchup don't work, dittos for the 3D offerings within the program. The notable exception is the guy who seems to have spent the last year of his life developing 'real life heroes' that has posted these wonderful, but mostly unusable types of figures in the 3D warehouse. If only he had made regular people...he could very well sell them in a bundle. I don't have much call for astronauts and deep sea divers.

@solo said:

It comes down to UV mapping, no matter how you skew or distort a texture in SU it will render accordingly in Vue.
The problem here is SU, there is a few UV tool that Thomthom has created which may assist you in mapping the textures as you need (I just cannot remember the names to search it),

That was what I thought...if you remember the tool that you are speaking of, please post it.

I had a similar issue about a month ago using a SU tile pattern, and found that the pattern was also height specific. That is to say, if I started the pattern at a point which was unequal to the multiplied nominal dimension of the particular tile size the tile would be interrupted instead of starting with a clean coursing. EX: if the individual tile size is 12" and I start the tiling at 30" above FF level, then I end up with my first row cut in half.

The other issue is that it seems a bit absurd to have to individually draw each brick in something as common in architecture as rowlock or soldier coursing. It makes sense to manufacture a picture to fit a particular space, and I understand that Vue imports the picture very well.

@solo said:

anyway once you have them orientated in SU as you need then they will import into Vue no problem, and without creating millions of unique textures.

...that was the only other solution that my brain revealed to me and why I asked the question...LOL

Thanks for your effort and quick response.

BTW: I see that you are using the UK equivalent of the Commodore 64......very funny!
I waited for the big guns: a Commodore 128...LOLOLOL

Back with another question.......

How does one go about making brick soldier coursing, rowlock and arches ( for use above windows etc. ) in sketchup and then translating that into vue?

I have been making individual bricks to represent this in sketchup, which is nuts enough, but translating that into vue becomes a monster which I don't seem to have the brain muscle to figure out...does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks in advance for showing me the magic button.

LOL

Thank you for the sample grass objects Sliner.

Thank you Karmoh for your suggestion on decay near foreign objects, and Sliner for your suggestion about 'Forcing regular alignment of instances' and your example which showed me it could be done simply.

I have taken these 2 pieces of advice and after playing with the sliders have arrived at the solution, which also involved the idea of using a ONE plant module ecosystem, instead of a 'bunch of grass', which I am assuming would NEVER contain itself within a prescribed border, but would rather center its' mass within those boundaries, leading to overlapping onto other surfaces.

Thank you all once again for your help.

Thank you for your effort in attempting to help me understand, but I still don't get it.
I have imported the model, broken it down into it's various object components, copied the 'grass' object,
pasted it onto another layer, and deleted the original grass object on the first layer. Next I changed the object
to an ecosystem and populated it with a livegrowth grass object.

In the examples below, you can see that the grass ecosystem ignores the perimeter selection that was made and
simply grows wherever it wants within the parameters of it's own specific design footprint. The only way I have gotten close to containing it is to make the scale so tiny that it encroaches more like an inch instead of a foot.

I am also attaching a pic of the layers for your review.

What am I doing wrong, or not doing?

@sheik said:

How about the improvemts in workflow from SU to Vue? I wasn't too happy with that in Vue6. Can I now make a model in SU, like an large scale urban plan, and then (comfortably) populate it with ecosystems etc.?

@solo said:

Yes you can, even with 6 it was possible (see my site for examples)

Vue is really cool, but I have this question that is an absolute bottleneck I haven't come up with a great answer for. In that such questions are probably meat for a Vue forum, the fact is, Sketchup was created for architectural purposes, not for fantasy landscapes, therefore how Vue interfaces to make Sketchup an incredibly powerful architectural tool is to me of stellar importance.

Question:

I have yet to find a convenient way of dealing with urban/residential lawns in Vue wherein one can populate with live growth plants, a geometric area 'ecosystem' with 'grass' and end up with a neat, manicured lawn that doesn't also want to bleed over a foot and a half into sidewalks and streets.

The idea of planting, resizing, and rotating individual objects until the area is filled and not spilling into the concrete is really an impossibility within the parameters of any commercial project.

Is there a way to do this that I don't know?

Gentlemen,

I have been asked to do a pylon sign which I would furnish as a basic animation view. The client wants to know if I can put moving scenes/graphics on it, since it will have a Las Vegas type display board.

Is there a way to do this internally in sketchup. and if not, how does one go about incorporating something like this afterwards?

@gaieus said:

Then it seems it wasn't the "wll known" shadow bug but the other "well known" flickering of Z-fighting faces.

LOLOLOL...yes you are correct, but I notice that 'well known' is in quotes.

It is easy to see the sort of 'flickering' that can take place when 2 planes occupy the same space, but in this case they were separated by a space. Given, the space was very small ( 3/8" ), nevertheless even though the planes did not contact one another, I had the problem. That makes me wonder just how far 2 planes need to be separated in order for this not to occur, or is there a limit at all when the 2 planes have faces which have the same facial orientation and are connected?

Curiously, the problem ONLY occurred in the animation export process, it did NOT show up in the 'real-time' walkthrough.

Thanks for the info.

It is an interior, however I am not using shadows since the lighting is so primitive as to only include one source within Sketchup, which is obviously outside of the interior and so doesn't really work anyway.

I did however find the solution to my problem which happened to occur only on these columns which I had made into components. They are just a bit complicated and include to make it simple to describe, boxes, attached to the columns. What that produced was two parallel faces ( one on the front of the box, another on the face of the column ). The problem was that both faces were facing the same direction instead of being opposite. Once I eliminated that, the white oddball flickering and shape shifting went away.

Help.

I've got a model (SKP6 ) that I've tried to export as an animation, and though the animation works well, there are these horrible white streaks that flicker throughout the various components as one moves through the animation.

I've checked the SKP forum which had 3 pieces of advice for someone who had written about it already.

1. The bug has been fixed in 6 if you have the latest version. ~ I do, and it wasn't.
2. Save the file to SKP5, and export from there since the bug wasn't present then. ~ I did, but the rendered quality isn't as good.
3. Shut off hardware acceleration in Open GL/Preferences. ~ I did, and it didn't work.

Does anyone know how to remedy this, and if not, does anyone know if this bug exists in SKP7? I'm a little leery of upgrading to find out that the bug may still be there.

Hello,

I am considering buying a Form Fonts subscription mostly for the sake of the 'Styles' for Sketchup use....but I am an obstinate Mac user, and there is NO info on the site about that.

Are these compatible with:

1. Mac
2. Mac Intel
3. PC XP
4. PC Vista
5. all of the above.

..or do you have the option to download these styles per your platform?

..does anyone know?