It sounds innovative- is this to allow you to export images to scale at specific paper formats or is it to allow easier/better artistic composition of images?

Thanks for that!

Wow, that is very cool. Thanks for the heads-up Paul!

LOL From a British point of view that photograph is hilarious! The hand gesture combined with the expression on your face create the perfect illusion of a drunken lout who has gatecrashed a high-society party! Brilliant!

Great Chris, I can't wait to see the fruits of your labours!

@unknownuser said:

I didn't misread. I know exactly what you meant. Again, the vulva is just another part of the body, ready to be srutinized by the artist. I don't mean this as a derogatory remark, but I find it quite strange to lump parts of the human anatomy into moral categories. This one's tasteful, that one's not. Seems a bit primitive to me. (I know this sounds a bit rude. I apologise for that: if this were a Dutch forum, I'd probably be able to bring my point across in a much more subtle way.) Magical thinking, you know?
You put your point across extremely well actually; your username belies your intellect! Regarding "I find it quite strange to lump parts of the human anatomy into moral categories", I couldn't agree more however you obviously understand that all art must be analysed contextually. If a female artist creates images or sculptures of female genitalia it would be highly unlikely that she is doing so with an intent to degrade or objectify women. If a male artist created identical artwork we have to analyse it differently (or do we? Discuss! ) as there is an entirely different implication in the context of the male gender traditionally having dominated and objectified the female gender.

I would suggest that even the greatest artists (and their patrons) tend towards objectification (i.e. lumping parts of the human anatomy into moral categories)- how many of Michaelango, Canova or Rodin's sculptures feature elderly figures, or flat-chested females, or short men? There is a massive imbalance towards young, large-breasted females (although Michaelangelo personally may have tended towards male figures for obvious reasons). Looking at the endlessly repetitive and unrealistically proportioned renders over at Renderosity it is clearly implied being old or having small breasts for example is somehow un-feminine- a notion which should be offensive to everyone. All I'm saying is if we shouldn't interpret body parts as having distinct meanings then why are so many nude images focussed on the breasts, backside or genitalia and the female rather than male body? There's very clearly an intent there, one which I find a little tasteless unless it's intellectually justified.

@unknownuser said:

With all due respect, I firmly disagree. If Christ's renders would have been pornographic, then you'd have a valid point. But are they pornographic? In my opinion: no. They merely show a naked body. Nothing wrong with that: the nude has been an artistic genre for centuries.

Maybe it's because I studied art, but these images seem fairly 'common' to me. They're just your average tasteful, even bourgeois nudes. (Not meaning to insult you here, Christ.)

I also studied at art school for 7 years so I'm by no means prudish when it comes to artistic nudes. Please note my criticism was directed at only two of the images: the ones that are centred predominately on the genital area of the figure. If you were to analyse these images from an artistic standpoint, the choice of "camera" angle is vital in interpreting them, so my criticism is valid IMO. Maybe I'm being more critical than others as I used to frequent the Renderosity forums a lot for Vue tips and was frustrated by the overwhelming number of renders there of nude and lingerie-clad female Poser figures (usually unrealistically skinny, with enormous breasts and practically teenage faces ). There is no doubt in my mind that the renders on Renderosity are soft porn and frankly made what was otherwise a very good CG forum feel somewhat tacky and creepy. I'm not saying that Christ's renders fall into that category, but judging by Renderosity it's a fine line when nude renders start being posted before they start flooding in and their content becomes more questionable.

@kwistenbiebel said:

Personally I had it with the negative comments from the moderators.
Too much nude, not enough Sketchup...
Anything else?
You're pushing me away here.
Christ, I don't know what to say other than what's wrong with a bit of negative criticism, whether it's from moderators or not? You can hardly say we're being unfair as we've praised your other work plenty of times. Coen's criticism of posting images of purely imported geometry is valid- this is an SU site, so geometry created solely in other software is not really relevant here. Of course we all import and export stuff, floor plans, topography, figures, etc, but when the entire featured geometry wasn't in any way modelled in SU then this isn't really the place for it.

Like "Stinkie" you seem to have misread my post and assumed I have some issue with "too much nude"- it's nothing to do with "too much nude"; if I must spell it out I felt there was too much focus on the perineum in the 1st image and on the vulva in that 4th to be tasteful.

@kwistenbiebel said:

if people would find this last image to be offensive I'll kindly remove it. (I hope not though).
So why the threat of "You're pushing me away here." when I post some criticism of it? I didn't even ask you to remove it!

Seriously, this shouldn't turn into a big deal, it's simply a minor reminder from one moderator that posted work should be SU based and a criticism from me (in a non-moderator role) regarding the camera angle in a couple of renders.

A perfect example of the best ideas being the simplest- what a cool product! I don't know how you would go about manufacturing it, but imagine if you could jumble around the optic fibres so they weren't running laterally or parallel- you would get a jumbled up "shadow" of whatever (or whoever) was on the other side, with little or no recognisable features. Plato's slaves would have their work cut out interpreting those shadows!

Jon,

God, I really shouldn't post late on Saturday nights! At first I couldn't understand how that happened (as I just used the standard forum quote button), but I realised I must've selected Tom's text, but clicked the quote button below (i.e. in your reply) rather than above. DOH! Thanks for pointing that out, sorry for missattributing that to you.

Back to forum school for me!

Ah, that explains it. I only copied whichever layer was active, but I guess there was geometry within that group on another layer.

OMG, that is weird! I have no idea why that is happening, there don't seem to be any locked groups or geometry- was any of it locked in the past? I think this file should be posted in the bug forum and emailed to Google for them to run a bug check.

The good news is that the workaround really simple- just copy and paste it into a blank file and then it behaves normally.

Type 205 Fixed.skp

Hi Maxx,
Welkom!

BTW, I love SA- what a beautiful country.

@tomsdesk said:

Dual core not supported by SU? I'm told I'll still see faster because windows functions will operate on one while SU is using the other?
This is definitely NOT TRUE (although I've also heard "experts" say otherwise).

I know this because I had an HPzd7000 Pentium4 2.4GHz lappie which died and was replaced by a HP dv8000 Centrino Duo 1.83GHz and although it is a better machine in every way, much better nVidia graphics card, bigger HDD and more RAM (only 1.5Gb though), runs multiple programs brilliantly, runs some programs (especially render progs) faster and runs way cooler IT DEFINITELY RUNS SKETCHUP SLOWER. Not a little bit slower but almost a third slower. In other words I went from having 2.4GHz available to run SU to having 1.83GHz. Dual core CPUs may allow SU to run faster when you're machine has several high demand progs running at the same time, but I used to have Vue d'Esprit rendering in the background while modelling in SU all day and yet SU was still very noticably slower when I switched to the dual core CPU.

Having said that don't let me put you off- I wouldn't change back for anything! Even though 90% of my work is done in SU it's still way fast enough for even large architectural models. I love that my render progs run almost twice as fast and knowing that my machine isn't running at MAX POWER all the time (my old machine got HOT... TOO HOT) helps me sleep better at night.

In any case, it can only be a matter of time before SU goes multi-thread.

@mike lucey said:

A true expert does not care about the vehicle used to achieve the required end result. As far as they are concerned the simpler the 'tool' that can be used to achieve this end, all the better.
Perfectly put!

@kwistenbiebel said:

The image is meant to emphasize on the beauty of the female body and not to be disrespectful.
It's not so much emphasizing the female body as emphasizing a particular part of the female body. I'm not offended, but that last pic (and to a lesser extent the first one) is a bit tasteless IMO.

Vær så god og velkommen!

You can find this out by switching to wireframe rendering mode, select and hide all the edges of your chosen geometry, then switch back to shaded with textures mode (or any face rendering mode) which will display the faces without the edges. Select all the faces, right-click and select "Entity Info"- a new window will pop up and shows you the number of faces selected. If you don't go through the whole process and just choose "Entity Info" (which can also be chosen from the Window dropdown menu) it'll show you how many entities are selected, but it doesn't distinguish between edges and faces. I actually thought it did, I'll add this to the Wish List forum.

Beautiful work Sean!

Just out of interest, if you often make working SU models, have you tried using the SketchyPhysics beta plugin? Check out the SketchyPhysics forum below to see what it's capable of. You'll need to install the plugin in to view the models in action, but it's one of the most pretty impressive (and free) SU plugins IMHO.

301 Moved Permanently

(www.sketchucation.com)

Unless somebody's created a ruby I don't know about, the only way is the looooong way. Copy each scene (right click on each existing scenes and select "add scene" -it's easier that way than using the scene manager)- then (using the scene manager this time) move every second scene into the reverse order. Tedious work for sure.

The only real help I can give you is a link to Todd Birch's brilliant free SceneRename ruby:

301 Moved Permanently

(www.sketchucation.com)

Once you've loaded it up you'll find "Renumber Scenes" at the bottom of your View menu- click it and it'll rename all your scenes in numerical order again after you've moved them all around. It's a real time saver.

@tomsdesk said:

The number of segments of any entity that lists as a circle or an arc can be changed in the "entity info" toolbar.

Wow- great tip Tom!