@unknownuser said:

To make curves appear smoother, try this...
BEFORE importing anything eg from Autocad.
Select Circle Tool - Then Go to VCB (Box in Lower Right Hand Corner)- Type in the No. of Segments Reqd (eg 64 if you want a really smooth curve).
Draw Circle.
...
Import Autocad Data
...
Delete Circle

Sorry Howard- that doesn't work, see my post above.

Hopefully Craig D can answer this for certain, but as far as I'm aware there is no way to alter the number of edges/facets that SU's dwg importer creates. I've tried changing the default 24 edges in the circle tool in a skp file and then importing a dwg, but the importer always reverts to 24 edges. Adding this option to the preferences menu is a good idea for the wishlist- I think I'll add it.

I would say though that it does encourage "best practice" in SU i.e. edit and model your number of edges according to your need. 24 edges on a table leg may be excessive, but for the edge of a curved kerb it might be insufficient.

Hi Jeff and welcome to the SCF forums! You'll find us a helpful, friendly bunch bound together by a love of SU amongst many other varied common interests. Hope to see your work in the gallery some day.

Regards,

@ross macintosh said:

Next time, in promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectations.

Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent!!

Or in other words, cease obfuscation!.

(Ross, that text is hilarious!)

Happy Birthday! Hope you had a great one!

@utiler said:

A simple script to right-click, select "hide in current scene only" would do the trick......
A

SU does this as default- if your component is visible in all your scenes, but you hide it in one (and update that scene) it will still be visible in the others..... although it might be handy if you could right click and select "hide in all scenes"... in fact if the same function were available for layers that would be very useful. Hmmm... time for a wish list post I think.

The one most important bit of layer advice I would offer is to always keep them to a minimum. It's fine to have 20+ layers in Autocad (or 200+ if you're a surveyor!), as you tend to only work in a few at a time (and they tend to be coloured by layer), but in SU I find multiple layers become a pain to deal with as they need to be switched on and off so often and it's not obvious visually which geometry is on which layer. I try to keep less than 5 ideally: typically (for architecture) "plans" containing dwg plans and sections for setting up the model, "roof" so I can switch it off for working on interiors, "furniture" and "trees" as these components can really slow down an SU file when you're working on it.

BTW, the hidden attribute of components and groups are saved with scenes, but only if they are independent i.e. if a group is within another group it's hidden attribute will not be saved with a page. IMHO it's important to understand this as it can really help reduce the number of layers you need to create.

I (like most SU Pro users) model everything on layer 0. I only create new layers and move geometry to them for 2 reasons- either for viewing, so different pages have different parts of the model diplayed or for hiding irrelevant geometry while I'm working on the actual building (trees, cyclorama, landscape, etc.) I always have a page called "Working" saved with a file which shows just the building, maybe some imported dwg plans, no shadows and a 50mm focal length.

On the rare occasion that I do a 1:1 construction detail in SU I'm more likely to use a layer for each material/element, as you tend to do in Autocad.

It's probably too late now, but FYI SU can undo (and redo) 100 actions.

SchreiberBike,

Thanks for the great tip on the Purge ruby- it's bugged me forever that the purge command is hidden away in SU's menu system. These fanstastic Ruby scripters are victims of their own success- there's so many now that it's a huge task to go through them all to find the ones I like. This one is very useful.

Happy Birthday Brad!

Have a vintage Diet Pepsi on me!

(modelled on a 20 year old can I found under my floorboards)

I assume the texture is applied within the group, not outwith, i.e. with the default texture on the selected face?

Is it possible that "soften edges" has been applied to that surface or group?

I did a little test and the only other way to have a texture which didn't generate those options on the context menu was if it was a flat uniform material i.e. it doesn't use a reference image, but that obviously isn't the case with your example.

Hmmm.... this is a tricky one. Can you post the model or part of it?

Jackson

Jim is correct- you can do whatever you want to your component or bitmap folders and it won't affect SketchUp files which use those files. I've reorganised my components and materials libraries many times over the years and it's never caused a problem with SU files. In fact, when I suffered an HDD crash and lost almost everything I'd done I managed to recover a lot of components and materials by saving them back out of several SU models.

It's a simple feature which I LOVE about SU. I hate how other progs (notably Vue which I use a lot) screw up every time a path to a material texture or model is altered- it keeps file sizes down (fractionally), but it's a royal pain in the behind.

Jackson

Wow, I really need to rummage through the Depot again- I'd missed this great script! Thanks for the info Edson.

Jackson

Thanks guys,

All images except the nightshot are straight out of SU6, just resized in Photoshop. I love that exploded axonometrics in SU are SO ridiculously easy to produce. I used to enjoy drawing exploded axos by hand at university, but you had to be careful to get the composition correct right at the start- I think the first one I did went off the top of the paper.

Jackson

...and plans, sorry they're not annotated, but they are pretty self-explanatory; sleeping accomodation and small office on ground floor, living spaces on first floor.

First Floor, living room/dining room, kitchen, utility room, shower room and WC.

Ground Floor, small office by entrance, four bedrooms and bathroom.

.and here's a couple of SU interior shots...

Modelled and rendered in SU6

Just thought I'd post this competition entry we just submitted on Friday a week ago (sorry can't give more details yet). From start to finish, analysing the brief, designing, modelling, rendering and formatting an A1 presentation board took 3 working days- can't believe we (2 of us) made it. I slept VERY well on that Friday night!

Critique and comments welcome, although don't get too technical on construction yet!

Jackson

Yep, groups can cut holes too, but that moving window thing is weird indeed. They even move after locking them!

@jclements said:

I know about the export function. I did do that already; however, I know that somethings didn't come across properly.

I also noticed this recently when I exported my shortcuts to a colleague's PC. 90% of them came across fine, but a few didn't. Weird, this is one for the bug forum.