@mitcorb said:

If you have not already done so, why not post this in the Sketchup9 Wishlist thread?

I didn't know there was an SU-9 wishlist topic, nor did I know that SU-8 is not the "next" SU. Is SU-8 out now?

I've encountered a problem (not a bug) with Entity Info. It is onscreen all the time, and I use it extensively. I also use layers a lot, having over 100 in some models. I create a lot of nested layers for multiple copies of an entity set in place, on its own layer, to track changes and to show different configurations, within a nesting set under a blanket layer.

The problem is when I edit an entity that is buried under 2 or more layers, the layer info is not shown in Entity Info. Only the top layer will show but not when I edit the entity. It is easy to lose track of which entity copy I am working on. Up to now the only way to know what layer I am actually editing in is to toggle the layers in the set till SU says I can't turn it off.

So, if Entity Info could always display the objects true layer while in edit mode, and the one above as well; because 99% of the time all geometry is on layer 0, but the objects group or comp is on some named layer within some other layer. I've learned the hard way to control layer visibility so that is not a problem.

SU is a 3D drafting app, but in 2D presentation.
How's about a visual 3D presentation, using anaglyph red/green glasses.

Display only, you may not be able to draw in this mode.

This can be done with any PC monitor and video card. SU needs to be able to have 2 simultaneous camera angles (view ports) set about 3-6+ inches apart. That's the hard part. One camera sees red, the other green. The model is drawn in SU in a normal fashion, then with a mouse click into 3D-Vision mode, the model is viewed in red and green lines by the 2 cameras. Now you can see the model in a "true" 3D wearing the glasses. The pan & zoom functions must still be functional in 3D-Vision mode, or the real effect will be lost.

ps: I'm placing this on the V9 suggestions topic. Best to follow it there.
Thanks

@honoluludesktop said:

I would consider resetting my system to a point when everything was functioning OK.

That did work.... Big Thanks

Went back 2 days to be sure.

@sketch3d.de said:

@jgb said:

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library
Runtime error

try if re-installing the Microsoft VC++ 2008 SP1 Redist. Package helps.

hth,
Norbert

Thanks, but it did not work.

Gonna try reverting, if I can figure out how. It's been 3 years since I did it last.

@gaieus said:

@jgb said:

Making Outliner a paid upgrade was also a reason.

Hi Joel,

You must have misunderstood something. The Outliner is still a feature of the free version.

I believe you, but last year I was told in the old forum that it was no longer part of SU 7.0 free. Only in Pro, like dynamic Components.

My $0.02 (Canadian)

I have avoided upgrading SU 6.1 (free) to 7.1 (free) because I felt it did not offer enough upgrade to warrant the hassle of upgrading. Making Outliner a paid upgrade was also a reason.

I may reconsider moving up to V8.

3 of my wish list would be.....

1. A better editing facility for materials, especially within the Materials section.
   You need to pull a material into a drawing before you can edit it, even to change the color slightly, or change the color/texture name. Then you need to export that change out to another list to use it later. You cannot even change the orientation of a texture (vert/horiz).
   Then I just found out that a large scale change to an object/component with a texture changes the scale of the texture, totally screwing up the look of it beside other same textured unscaled objects, unless I reset scale definition, which I do not always want to do.
   Then I would also want to be able to sort colors/textures in the entity info box, and also be able to purge unused colors/textures. This is important where I have been playing with shades of the same color/texture before getting it right. Now I cannot get rid of the unwanted and unused variations.

2. Better and expanded use of control keys for shortcuts. Right now only the shift, ctrl and alt keys are used by shortcuts in combo with alpha keys. Expand them with the tab key and the special function keys for the Windows and Mac k/b's. It would be very useful to be able to define the axis (red,blue&green) from the left side of the k/b as well as the arrow keys.

3. Make full use of the multi-buttoned mouse. Most mice these days have horiz scroll wheels. SU ignores them. My Logitech mouse has a total of 11 buttons and scroll wheel functions. SU only sees 5 of them.

Yesterday I exited SU 6.1 in a normal fashion. Then I turned off the PC.

Today, even after I do a reboot, when SU starts up and is at the point of setting up the toolbars I get the following popup box.

Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library
Runtime error
Program:
This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the applications support team for more information
[OK]

When I click [OK] SU terminates.

Any ideas????

Just browsing through posts.

If you have too much detail or hidden stuff on top, try moving the WHOLE model UP by 3 ft, then with a front or side view, L-R select the LOWER part of the model and move it DOWN 3 feet. Then you can go in and fix any bits that either didn't move or accidentally moved. This avoids moving & fixing the far more complex upper part of the model.

Ships and planes share the same SU design challenges.

One tip: Best to work on a 1/2 hull as a component, then when done copy it abeam, flip it and move them together. Don't explode or merge them. Now any changes to one side is reflected on the other.

If you are dealing with very small differences, and zoom in closer, you will encounter the "clipping" phenomena, where the model starts to vanish as you get closer. This is annoying but normal. Took me over a year of frustration to find out how to avoid that.

To stop clipping, click on the camera drop-down menu and turn perspective off. You will now be able to get in very very close. However, clipping is reversed and the model starts to vanish as you zoom out, and it will look somewhat distorted. Then just turn perspective back on.

You can put the Perspective Icon toolbar on by clicking on View Toolbars Options. The "Camera Perspective" button is 2nd from the right.

Also, if you are very close to the object when you turn Perspective off, the view will suddenly zoom far out, and you can lose sight of the object. So, to minimize that, select the object, or something close by before you switch off, and now you have a target to easily relocate.

@unknownuser said:

[edit] oh, and you can draw about a gazillion helixes in the time it took joel to type that up

Hey Just because I 2 finger type doesn't mean it took me that long. Only 30 minutes. Enough time for a million, maybe, but not a gazillion for sure. Even on a fast PC.

And it's "helices".... so there!

Believe me, fairings will take about as long to do as the airplane itself.

I do use the arc tool a lot, but with reduced sides. Then I triangulate each side to form the fairing faces. The triangulation needs to be consistently done, and avoid hubs or spiders where possible. Expect that many triangles will have to be done over from opposing corners, or even split up into smaller triangles to get a smoother surface.

SU does not always form a face when you make a triangle. You have to be very careful and draw lines from endpoints only. If a face still refuses to form, delete all 3 lines and do it over. And, as an added irritation, face reversal happens often.

Then you have to tweak the fairings at many of the intersections with the copy/move tool, working one axis at a time, with constant rotation and pan/zoom to eye the smoothness.

Make all the lines soft/smooth (entity info or ctrl+eraser tool). Avoid hidden lines, except at edges that fair into other surfaces. Keep hidden lines visible at all times except to check the job overall.

Plan to spend some tedious time doing a fair job. (pun intended)

There is no tool or Ruby I know of that can create a spiral or spring, or I would be using it now, instead of this way I developed. It is simple but can get tedious, and you need the Pipe-along-path Ruby installed. Do not use the [follow-me] tool as it distorts the ends.

1: Determine the overall diameter, length and number of turns in the spiral, lets say a spring 2 inches diam X 10 in. long with 20 turns.

2: Define the diameter of the wire, say .1 inch

3: Calculate the diam and length of the centerline of the wire, in this case 1.9 in diam X 9.9 in long (same 20 turns)

4: Caclculate the turn pitch (space between turns), in this case, .495 inch (9.9 in / 20 turns)

5: In SU draw a circle in space .95 in radius. Delete the face.
NOTE: Keep the number of side facets as low as practicable. SU defaults to 24 sides. Lets use 12 sides in this example.
If you are new to SU, these are the steps to do that. Select the [circle] tool and immediately (before you click the center point) type 12S and press <enter>, click the center point and start a circle, then type .95 <enter>. SU will draw a 12 sided 1.9 in diameter circle.

6: Select and copy the perimeter 12 times to a distance of .495 inch. You need 13 circles .0413 in apart.
Select the perimeter, then the [copy/move] tool. Click on the circle, press [ctrl] and move the copy along the springs centerline axis out a bit, type .495 <enter> to move the copy .495 in away, then type 12/ <enter> to make 12 copies within the space. Total of 13 circles.

7: Make the 13 circles a group. Not a component.

8: Now the tedious part. DO NOT EDIT THE GROUP. At a vertex endpoint on the first circle (#1), draw a single line to the next vertex endpoint in the next circle (#2)in the direction you want. Make very sure you draw between endpoints. Do this in turn from point #2 to circle #3, etc. till you make 13 line segments in a spiral, not 12. You now have 1 complete turn of the wires centerline.

9: Delete the circle group, but not the lines you just drew. Ensure the lines are contiguous by selecting the first segment and double-clicking on it. All 13 lines should highlight. If not, delete the first non-highlighted line and redraw it between endpoints.

10: With all 13 segments highlighted, open the P-A-P tool (in Plugins) and define the outside diameter of the wire (.1 in), inside diam = 0 and the number of sides, again keep it low, say 8 or 12, and then press <enter>. You now have a group of 1 turn of your spring.

11: Select the turn, select the [copy/move] tool, click on the start end of the turn, click [ctrl] then the axis key and drag the copy till it snaps to the tail end of the first turn. Now type 19X <enter> to complete your 20 turn spring.

12: You can either leave it as 20 groups, or if you want copies of it, explode all 20 groups, then make the whole spring a component. You may also notice the overall dimensions are not exact, which is due to SU's internal level of accuracy. You can adjust the overall length with the scale tool, but not too much as to distort the wire diameter shape. If high accuracy is important, measure the error and redraw with the necessary corrections.

It takes about 5 minutes to make a spring. Size doesn't matter, here anyway!

2 years using SU and I never noticed that.
Thanks

@thomthom said:

@jgb said:

And people wonder why I stick with Version 6.

? Nothing in this thread is related to SU version...

I have never had any of those issues in V6.

I have read of countless new and improved problems in V7 and V7.1, and yet few of the real V6 problems have been fixed in V7.x

V7.x Free offers so little extra (notably the line crossing fix) over V6 Free that it makes no sense to me to upgrade for more problems.

@messire said:

Hi all,
i need to rescale it down 0,9939 to 1 but it seems the scale tool only accepts increments of 0,01
thnx
Nils

That .01% snap-to is a real pain, but you can define it more accurately. Just scale it to about the size you want, and type to the VCB the actual ratio you want and [enter].

Often when I need to scale down/up just a tad, it will snap to the nearest .01%. If I move the cursor, it snaps up or down to the next .01%, say between .98 and .97, and I want something in between.

So I estimate where in between and say it is .0976 Just simply type .976 [enter] and it will scale to that. If it is off a bit, undo and just rescale from there at say .9765 or .977

I have found trying to enter an exact dimension is a hit or mostly a miss situation. I just put in a guide line where I want the edge to be, and then snap the scale to that. It can get tricky though.

I had this problem in spades, then a while back Catamountain made a remark in passing that gets around this clipping problem, but does not eliminate it.

The reason clipping happens is due to perspective. As you get in close (in proportion to the models dimensions) SU cannot resolve the angularity (like our eyes can) and clips what it cannot draw. Setting field-of-view helps, but only a little.

To solve this problem, turn OFF perspective view. You can then get real close and personal with the entity. There will be no clipping as you get closer, but it will clip as you zoom out from the entity, exactly the reverse.

Two cautions before you turn off perspective (Camera - perspective).
If the drawing is dimensionally big or complex, select the entity first, or some line nearby. That makes it easier to find when you turn off perspective.

Zoom OUT so that the entity is some distance away and centered in the screen. Then turn off perspective. The view will shift a bit, and then you can zoom in as close as you want. If you don't zoom out, SU may get very far out and you could lose sight of the entity.

After you are done examining and fixing the problems, turn perspective back on.

I just finished a huge complex model, a very detailed BA-609 TiltRotor and uploaded it to the warehouse.
It is a SU-V6 model, 6mb on my disk. (one of my smaller ones)

The first message I got was it was too big to upload, but it uploaded anyway.
Here are the problems.....

The warehouse image is all black.

When I downloaded it into my PC (to test) several things were amiss.
All the scene animations were gone.
The airplane skin surface reverted to default white/blue when the model was drawn in white/white (redefined default). This seemed to happen where I painted the backside in a greenish color (zinc-chromate).
As a result, the model looks like hell.

I previously uploaded a large model, the GE90-115b engine (about 5.8mb) and had no problem, mind you it was not as complex a model.

Any ideas how to fix this????

I recently finished a very complex model (see my next post re. BA-609) in which the entire surface of this airplane, and most of the interior detail is made of soft/smoothed lines. As almost all of this model could not be formed by extrusions, I was forced to draw every line, then reselect and soft/smooth it, with the exception of surface boundary lines. Selecting is not the problem per se, as I am using Toms selection utility Ruby (fantastic utility ) but it is still mostly tedious nit picky work.

Is there a way I can selectively draw directly, soft/smooth lines rather than normal "solid" edge lines?