Maybe hidden geometry. Make sure it is unchecked in the saved view.

@mitcorb said:

Side comment:
What I greatly dislike about Autocad is the inclusion of the zooms and pans in the history/memory stack. As far as I know, you cannot exclude this completely.

I think SketchUp is unusual in this regard in that it's Undo and Redo function addresses changes to the model, not changes to the viewing position. Which is much, much better than the way AutoCAD handles it.

In my work I've never found a need to realign the model axes although I think some folks find it useful. No matter what you do to those axes, though, the groundplane and north remain in the same location. Well, north can be changed but the axis orientation has nothing to do with that. I have seen having a number of models from others in which the axes have been moved or realigned causing the model to be drawn skewed at some strange angle.

Your sequence reminds me of this post.

http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=40331&start=15#p393786

I haven't tried it. You might find the whole thread interesting.

It looks like you got instant Terrain plugin too?

Ah, right, the push/pull command!

I ended up drawing a simplified set of planes (like a bunch of playing cards glued together end to end, at different elevations) then push/pulling the road drawing through the ring of cards, and intersecting with model. Worked like a charm. I also downloaded Instant Roads. Going to try out the demo some time in the future.

Thanks for the help everyone

Your renders improved a lot!

I don't know how your render engine works, but see if you can get the sun shadows to get a little softer. Seems to me that they are too hard/sharp right now.

Kyle, what about this one:

Masonry.Stone.Ashlar.Random.Broken Coursed.jpg

Twilight can do that -- Neon lights: http://twilightrender.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1797&start=0
Animation in Twilight: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=306208#p306208

Or Kerkythea, which is free, can do that too(just not as easily): http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php

Vue can do neon lights and animations as well.

Those are just a few renderers I am familiar with, but most others should be able to as well.

Yikes! Thats a nasty case of black mold. I'd get it professionally removed, its a bit of a health concern.... 😄

Sorry, I have no valuable input.

Ah, okay, the blanks in my memory are now filled in. Thanks for the help, Jeff and Rclub! I'll try out the Round Corner plugin, and maybe Subdivide n Smooth later, if I can't get what I want out of Fredo's plugin.

Almost exclusively. I'm not entirely sure why 3ds Max seems to be the go-to program for arch-viz. It may be a 'better' modeler in terms of features and flexibility but it's not even close to being as intuitive as SU and SU can do 95% of what 3ds Max can do in terms of Arch-Viz modeling. I could see myself someday getting to the point where I use 3ds Max for my site work, but it's hard to find a compelling reason to model a building in 3ds Max as opposed to SU.

-Brodie