"Amazing" co-incidence.

I was editing a group and moved the cursor off the object.

Boom! Hyper-zoom.

Now I am sitting on the moon looking at my model. (well, not that funny)

I cannot zoom back. I can spin the mouse wheel till it needs new batteries for all that I seem to get closer.
Zoom extents puts me back on the moon.

Repeated Zoom window gets me closer, upto a point, maybe near the ISS.
I can select all, and see a very tiny blue blob near the origin.

But if I try to zoom in, hyper-zoom brings me way past the object, and zoom window places the object out of view; where I don't know and any zooming or panning gives me the hyper-zoom effect and....
"To the moon, Alice."

Extra points if you can tell me who said that.

How do I get back to my model

=====================================

Belay that. I got "home". I Zoom-Window'd over a larger area, and in such a way that the blue blob was just at the center of the window. After 5 times my model was big enough on screen to zoom in.

Now my problem is how to clear what may be a tiny line sitting on the moon so my extents are the model and not trans-lunar space.

Still, extra points if you can put a name to the quote. (That will also date you )

TIG;
Seems to work fine with comps now. Thanks for the response.

@tig said:

Here's v1.5 http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=359994#p359994
it now works on groups AND component instances; makes the result unique, if needs be.

Thanks a bunch. I'll check it on Sunday.

TIG; Just curious....

Any reason SS does not work on components, but only on groups?

Since almost all my drawings are made of solid comps, I only use groups to keep stuff together, or for layering options. When SS says "Select a group..." when I select a comp, I have to edit the comp, select all, and group it to work, then explode the group. A bit of a pain.

Otherwise it works reasonably well on SU 8-Free. I generally like to cleanup my solids manually, after SI reports problems. SS tends to clobber very complex solids, which I generated in a quick but sloppy manner, so the fixing after SS may take longer than doing the fix manually in the first place.

Mind you, SS is far more adept at fixing some real toughies, such as co-linear lines, and co-resident faces. I had one "celebrated" comp that had 7 (count-em) 7 co-resident faces in 3 places. I went nuts fixing one of the faces, then sent SS after the others. I only had to redraw 2 lines to fix that after.

@gilles said:

Sketchup/Preferences/Drawing/Display Crosshairs could be a start.

Neato. Long time ago I tried crosshairs, but found them a bit distracting, so I never used them.

And, Cotty, Thank YOU too. Setting a hotkey (F2 for me) did the trick. Now crosshairs are useful to me.

It even flummoxed ThomThom. How rare is that

In that light, consider this "Wish" as granted.

Here's a wish for next version.

I often have large objects with a lot of small detail. If I zoom into a detail bit, say a small line, to copy or move it (or any other operation) I lose sight of the RGB axis reference, either the main or local comp/group axis. Then when I want to move/copy/draw etc. in that close in view along an axis, the visual reference is gone. I need to zoom out to see where the axis of choice is, then zoom back in. That can be counter productive with a large model, especially if the tool on object has been selected.

How's about putting a small 3-axis reference icon on screen somewhere?

Autocad (with all its' ills) does that in a halfassed way.

It can be dynamic and only appear when no axis reference is visible, or always there, or hot-key toggled, whatever. Even a plug-in!

No "Plugin" that I am aware of.

If the Diagrid is regular, then draw up a single segment as a component, and then replicate it to form the overall model.

Or draw the line, then select the ERASER tool. With thumb holding down the <CTRL> key, click the eraser on the line. It will become soft and smooth.

If you hold both <CTRL> and <Shift> keys, a smooth, soft or hidden line becomes hard.

Just a note to keep in mind when pushing a hole past a face.

If the lines defining the hole, and/or the lines forming the face are close together, then the intersect may not fully complete the intersection properly around the close lines.

If you select (or try to delete) any of the post-intersect faces and the selection does not follow the intended perimeter, then you need to hunt down the missing tiny intersect lines and manually replace them, going endpoint to endpoint. Just <undo> to just before the error appears.

There is usually one major condition that causes the missed lines, and that will complicate (to the point of frustration) any manual corrective operation.

If you get the message "Constrained by ......." then that means the line you want to draw (and the line that intersect failed to draw) is very close but not aligned to an axis.

SU's snap function wants to go along the axis, and not to the very close endpoint you want. Completing the line in a constrained condition will cause a tiny line fragment to form, and usually that will prevent a face from forming, or not splitting the face/surface at the intersect perimeter.

If you get the "Constrained by ...." message going from endpoint A to B, then hit <escape> and draw the line from B to A. That almost always works.

Points taken.

I only (and very briefly) considered modifying and saving the modified SKP, not anything else, as TIG pointed out.

Before you distribute the SKP file, make it "Read Only".
Then they change whatever they want, but not save it.
But a password enabled "Edit Allowed" as you suggest is a better way.

@thomthom said:

@jgb said:

Orient faces does not always work properly.

It won't work properly if your mesh has edges that connected to more than two faces. Then it's impossible to determine orientation.
I'd still try to orient faces correctly because tools will some times require faces to be oriented properly - otherwise unpredictable results occur.

Yeah, JPP and Curviloft in particular.

Maybe their next update should include an implicit Orient Faces before getting down to business.
I keep forgetting.

@snicolo said:

Workaround:
If you do not pre-select the face when doing the offset the crash does not happens.

It is a known crash and hopefully we will address it soon.

Good advice, however I have always preselected the face (habit) and as far as I can recall, SU never crashed before like this, until recently.

Also, lately, I've had 3+ "Splat-less" crashes just selecting other tools, last 2 were "Joint-push-pull".
In that case, I opened 2 SU sessions, copied the "problem" comp over, and it worked OK in session 2.
Copied back the edited comp and session 1 was normal since, even with JPP.

Again, this crashing seems more prevalent when my models get well over 200,000 lines, but I also have a few very stable 500K+ models. And as I said before, it seems more prevalent since I installed Simfonia, but I haven't used SAT for several weeks, and never in those "splat-less" models.

I dunno what problems you all had with ATI.

I had an older ATI card (ATX form 500mb) and it seemed flawless in SU and other graphic apps. Fast enough for all but the largest models panning.

Then my motherboard lunched and I replaced it, and the GPU with a newer NVidia (2GB) card and had weeks of frustration getting it setup correctly. All the colors were off, and no lines were as crisp as the ATI.

I tweaked multiple times, and defaulted at least twice. I've now settled for a near default setting, but I often get photos that are too dark, and need lightening up, which was very rare on the ATI. None of my SU materials look quite right and the lines are still not crisp like the ATI was. But it is good enough and I am used to it now, and it is faster panning large models than the ATI.

@mac1 said:

Install 1/2 , if no problem you know it is in other 1/2, divide the 1/2 by 1/2 again keep repeating. Can take just a few tries to find trouble maker. BTW that is called a maximum entropy search.

Binary search actually.

@thomthom said:

You some times see lines like that where geometry in different groups/components meet. It's the calculations of the pixels that doesn't meet up 100%. I usually get around it by applying the front material to the back. It can appear as though occasionally there are leaks where you see into the back/inside of the mesh.

Ya beat me to the answer.

For some time now, I have set both front and back default faces to white. Orient faces does not always work properly.

And, more importantly, I set both front and back faces to the very same texture/color.
That eliminates any phantom lines, and if there is an unwanted internal face, it shows as a white line on the surface.

@trogluddite said:

The classic example of course, is coming across an item in a menu with a name you've never seen before. "Oooh, it's in the same menu as the tools I use loads, could be a useful time-saver." - clicks help file...
"Discombobulationator - use this tool for discombobulationating."
Thanks a bunch! (Corel in particular seem good at this trick).

Years ago, before I discovered SU, I picked up a little freebee drafting app from TUCOWS.
It seemed simple enough and was aimed at drawing flow charts, which I needed at the time.

One of the first things I did was click on HELP, then "Documentation".

Here is a short extract as I remember it........

Drawing Tools.
LINE Use this tool to draw lines
CIRCLE Use this tool to draw circles
BOX Use this tool to draw boxes

You get the gist....

Then at the bottom of HELP was the "On-line website Help file"
So I clicked on it.........

It opened a page that was IDENTICAL to the Help documentation.

I guess my first clue should have been the web address..... ending in .RU

It was pretty good at drawing flow charts, but a bitch to edit anything, especially text.
Scrappo after 3 hours of frustration.

Intersect seems to fail in a number of ways, but not consistently enough to say "BUG".

In my list below keep in mind the word "consistently".
Most times intersect does work properly.

1: As noted above, 2 planar faces fail. Even if I redraw the lines manually. I need to delete all vestiges of the failed intersect and redraw the lines manually on face.
Again, even that sometimes fails.

2: Pass a vertical face through a horizontal face. If a vert line is offside the horiz face, it won't intersect. Happens more often if the faces are not perpendicular.

3: Pass a curved surface through any face or surface, and some parts will not intersect. Mostly very short intervals.

4: Intersect normally generates a myriad of hidden lines, but fails to delete all of them, leaving a mess to clean up. What's worse; deleting some of those hidden lines blows apart the face, and many times it can't be regenerated, forcing a multiple undo and a manual intersect.
This fail seems more prevalent in big models with over 200,000 lines.

5: This happens a lot. I push a face. I work on another part of the drawing not connected to either face. I then draw a circle on 1 face and push it till SU says "on face", but the face is NOT intersected. I need to undo and push past the face, then intersect and then .... See #4.

6: A corollary to #5 is a face with 1 or more holes in it. The face, but not any defining line, gets deleted. Selecting a boundary line and the "Face" command, regenerates the face, but not the holes. They are faced over, and many times an intersect will not restore the holes, then see #5 then see #4.

6: Intersect with model is supposed to ignore objects that are layered off. Yet sometimes I get all sorts of lines from layered off objects, and occasionally I even get intersect lines from previously DELETED objects.
And, sometimes I lose the face deleting unwanted lines.

7: Intersect seems to generate clusters of very tiny fragments around some intersections/vertices that are a real pain to find and delete. And deleting them usually blows away existing faces, and I have to regen all (but 1) of the lines/faces that were on that vertex.

Otherwise it works great.

Tried to do an offset on a completely different part, same model, and SU just vanished, no BugSplat came up.

This has happened several times sometime before, but I just restarted SU and it sailed on with no problems.

I can't prove this yet, but SU seems a bit unstable since I loaded Simfonia. I'm not using SAT in that model, but it loads as a plugin in all sessions. I may "unload" SAT to see, if this crashing continues.

@thomthom said:

@jgb said:

I've been having crashing problems in SU today in other areas as well. I haven't rebooted the PC to test, as I had some stuff to do and a reboot takes too long.

Make sure you submit them BugSplats so they are reported to the SketchUp team.

Yup! 5 times with descriptions of what I was doing each time. No matches with the Bug database though.