Mac1 Interesting read. I too do not buy canned computers, but put the components together myself. That way I get the performance and upgrade path to my liking, not some generalized box. HP, while they make very good computers allow very little non-HP upgrades. Dell is similar. You said your ISP charges extra for WIFI. Cut that cord!!! Get a simple cheaper non-WIFI modem from them. Then buy a WIFI Router and install it between the PC and Modem. That also gives you 4 LAN connections, or 3 free for other devices. Try to get a good high power router, especially if you have a large house or multi story house. Set it up on WPA and register every WIFI device (friends and relatives too) that will connect to it. You just need to define the devices MAC address to the router, and the password to the device. That way they automatically log in when booted or come in range. Nobody else can get in, even if they know the password. ISP WIFI Modems usually just need a password, their password, and the modem ID. I have a Cisco router. You can access the Administrator page from any registered device, or the PC with just its static IP Addr, Admin name and password. It also has a Guest access for ad-hoc access with a separate Password.

@dave r said: I was able to scale in between by snapping the scale handle to the intersection of two guidelines with no problem. The scale factor displays as ~1.01 but it is indeed snapping to the intersection. Part of the problem is the shape of the object is not uniform, although it is flat. So, the scale handles do not fall on any part of the selection perimeter. HOWEVER You gave me an idea that almost works perfectly, at least within an acceptable error. I needed to scale the thickness at one end of a tapered tube with a tapered thick skin from about .45inch down to .250inch (and to other thicknesses as well). The tube is about 8 feet in diameter (but squarish in shape) so the thickness changes are minute in comparison. I added a short line from the objects scalable (inside surface) perimeter down to where a scale handle is located. I then laid a guide line offset by that length from where the scaling should end up. I selected the perimeter and the tiny line then scaled (centered and uniform) down to the offset guideline. I got as close as .252inch after a few tries, good enough. Now, I gotta do that about 10 different times with different thicknesses. As for setting units, Model Info does not provide for setting scale precision, as it does for lines and angles. But still, is there any way to up the scale precision? I tried Fredos scale, but it didn't help, mainly I guess, due to my lack of fully knowing how to use that tool.

I've got a 42 and (3) 23's

@jgb said: Vertex Tools looks great but a bit overkill for me at this time. i can't figure out in wich way a piece of software that effective and with that price is an overkill.. just the merge vertex feature is about 245234533613644734% worth the money.. and the problem of small vertex gap is gone forever..

@jgb said: It even flummoxed ThomThom. How rare is that Exactly my first thought

@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.

Any further news on development here?

I had that feeling as well. Thanks for the confirmation.

Thanks, but for my specific problem that would only be a partial solution. It would do the spiral portion OK, but my bearings do a loop back through a specific path, that your solution could not handle. It would require a secondary operation to place bearings on that loopback path, and while not a difficult job, the "String Comps" Ruby did it all in a single step, not counting the path definition step I would need to do for both, if only partially for your solution.

I was really more curious about why than getting a fix. I edited the "solid" version with the open face, by deleting 1 line of the round hole and redrawing that 1 line. The face re-formed and the object is now a proper solid.

Dave, the way you do detailed threads is pretty much how I do them. You probably use Dynamic Comps, but I only use SU-Free so mine are a far less flexible. However filesize is not my concern. Entity count is. I hate the way SU slows down when my total model lines count gets near a million. I use judicious layer visibility but even that sometimes does not help much. Small bolt holes are drawn 12 sided, large holes are standard 24 sides. In an airplane structure, sections of parts that are low stressed, like "I" beam webs, typically have large holes in them simply to reduce the weight of material. Hole size, placement and spacing is calculated not to impair strength or stiffness. In my models they are there more-so for a realistic look, as I do not calculate their existence. Like I said, I am not making shop drawings. I've attached an extract of my big airplanes cargo floor support structure to demo how I can reduce the entity count of (2) components that are used repeatedly in the model. Normally I do not show most bolts in my structural drawings, but here I had too, as I needed to present a higher level of realism for this model. For the majority of holes, large or small, I do not push through the hole to the opposite face. For a 24 sided hole that creates 96 entities per hole, 24 faces and 72 lines. I just draw 2 circles, and paint the "hole" with transparent white, for a total of 50 entities, 48 lines and 2 faces. 1/2 the detailed way. And it maintains solidity, although I have to calculate for the "extra volume" of the fake hole. I also paint both side of any face the same, so looking in a hole doesn't look weird. That also eliminates backside shine through at the edges. For holes that are threaded, I used to draw extra circles down the hole to look like threads, and that alone kicked the entity count way way up. So now, instead of transparent color, I use a dark gray. No extra entities. Same for bolts.How to reduce entity count, yet look the same.

@dave r said: I don't think you can. I suppose you could rearrange them by editing their names. That only works in the materials list, not in Entity Info. Entity Info seems strictly sorted (and remains static) in order of initial application from Materials into the model. If you import a component or model from some other library, their colors are added to the list unless they have exactly the same name and color/shade (RGB) and that is why a lot of duplications exist. In one model that used a lot of imported components I ended up with 7 "blacks", all RGB=0,0,0 but the names were slightly different; ie: "00black, black-2, <black>" etc. I haven't played much with textures/colors to see if I have any control over that.

I just looked at that thread, and yeah, same request as mine. It will be interesting how it turns out. So this thread is considered closed.

Interesting, same end result I got. However, I never ever did (knowingly) a projected texture, and I have no idea of what use it really is. I just played around a bit and the simple fix is to bucket (re)paint the distorted faces from the materials drop-box, not from entity info, as I had always done before.

Did It!!! Attached is my near perfect Carbon Fiber material. Not quite the weave I wanted, but good enough. I may do another weave pattern later on. I found a JPG of this large format constant contrast weave pattern that was buggered with a watermark and with repetitive line artifacts strewn throughout. Now THAT sort of stuff I know how to edit out, but not the contrast deviations (yet). The color was also off, easy to fix. In SU I again adjusted the overall color balance, because SU does not seem to follow the Gamma setup of my Photoline32, and the texture map came in way too dark. Free to all to use! Thanks again guys... Free to use if anyone wants it.

I just discovered how that errant group may have formed within my hook tip. Curviloft; when it fails to form a surface, even though it shows a black pre-form surface, still generates an empty, or perhaps an almost empty group that SU interprets to be as a non solid. SI will correctly say it finds no errors, but SU will not see it as a solid. The only way out, is if you know you do have a valid solid after a Curviloft fail, but SU says not, then edit the solid and do a sweeping left select to select everything. Using TT's selection tools, select only groups, and there it is. Just hit the <delete> key to get rid of it. You cannot select just that empty group. If you have other valid groups in that selection, then deselect them first. I'm posting an edited version of this in the Curviloft thread.

@driven said: I tried boolean helper [ruby] to upscale 1000x then jpp to 250 inches seems to work... you do have some stray geometry that might be throwing it off... or try thomthom's shell john Stray geometry??? Where? EDIT---------------------- I closed the 8 slots on the base unit and put a temp cover on it to form a solid. Using SI I found some extra lines and corrected them. Then scaled up 10X. This time SU crashed at about 75% along the JPP progress scale.

@aerilius said: @jgb said: cannot boot any PC after WinXP destroyed the boot sector It doesn't boot the Windows XP CD (repair cd)? If the boot sector is not physically destroyed, there could have been a chance to try to type the word "fixmbr" into the recovery console. I was following the MS procedure to "Replace Motherboard" when I got BSOD as WinXP was finishing the "repair". Then I fixed that BSOD, but WinXP continued to get BSOD every reboot for various driver issues, until I gave up. It will now NOT allow me to reinstall as it always wants to complete the repair, which it can't. The "new" HD has Win-XP Pro on it and I am clearing it out of the old users non-essential stuff then I will start pulling my old stuff over to it. I suspect I will have to re-install most of it, and other issues are delaying me or just making life miserable.... but the new PC runs like stink. Except I am a bit disappointed with the NVIDIA GPU. My old 256mb ATI card of 7 years ago produced a much crisper image in SU than the newer 500mb NVIDIA, even at max resolution and with the best setting for anti-alias. But I can live with it.

I have Microsoft documentation on replacing the motherboard and re-installing XP. So far I have done a few conversion things, such as: getting my wireless router back up with a new host MAC addr; Redefining the default printer (temporary) and reading my mail on Yahoo rather than Thunderbird. I am waiting for an answer from NVIDIA regarding how this affects the display drivers, where my HD has an ATI driver and the PC has an NVIDIA card installed.