The biggest problem, I think, are the save/load times associated with SU and large files. They become unbearable for me long before I have any major crashing issues. 3ds Max has comparably incredibly fast save times, I suspect Rhino is similar. -Brodie

@alan fraser said: They ought to sort themselves automatically, as they are created. If not, try clicking the (faint) arrow on the layer name tab a couple of times. This has pretty much the same effect as when you change the sort order in a Windows folder. It seems like layer 0 is immutable and always stays at the top, though wow!! thanks

@rspierenburg said: Once again though, the modelling seems nice and clean and pretty intricate. thanks. ...although i know there'sbeen a lotta triangulation of simple rectangle faces..making model untidy..vray ignores those bad lines that come

@john2 said: well this plugin reverses my materials too i have to reapply materials [too much time wasted] on the white face that faces me now. Fix the face orientation before you apply materials, not after. If you did that you wouldn't be wasting time. Keep up with the face orientation from the beginning so you don't have to fix things later. Don't be a sloppy modeler and you won't have a lot of the problems you seem to be having according to your questions.

If you are running a tool that is very intensive then Sketchup can become unresponsive, and the screen 'whites-out'. It's likely it's still processing. The Task Manager window should show its memory usage fluctuating as it processes. If you want to kill it you can, but it might be near to the end of processing. Many scripts have show a status-bar 'progressbar' or a counter [10% or 1/1000 etc]. Unfortunately this will stop changing when unresponsiveness kicks in. Unfortunately Sketchup's timing seems to increase almost exponentially so 1000 operations don't take 10 times longer than 100, more like 100 times ! If you seem to be having problems open the Ruby Console before running the tool in question and see if there are any error messages, this might will indicate a failure - a Bugsplat! is a sure sign of disaster !

@tig said: Simply, something is wrong with the SKP's database. Usually it's Lines with zero length, or Faces with zero area, but it can also be incorrectly 'named' objects like Layers etc... In the case you show there was a [useless] tiny face with a 'zero' area, which it erased. SUp has 'tolerances' so that two vertices within a range are deemed to be coincident, otherwise you'd never get anything to form! Thus very very short edges can be thought of as zero length, which then produces a zero area face... Sometimes things fall through the net... In this case if you were making a Followme extrusion of a profile that had some tiny edges and it went around a path with some tiny segments, then quite often it just fails to make those 'too tiny' faces (<~0.01sq") and leaves a hole in the mesh; in your case perhaps it actually made a tiny face that was effectively zero area, but after auditing the database and realizing it, SUp erased it - as it's effectively of no use to you. holy cow!!! seems like you've extracted all the coding of sketchup!!! you really know all the nuts and bolt assembling of sketchup working!

You might find a lot of your questions are answered by reading the text where you download the plugins. For example, on the page where you downloaded Soap Skin Bubble you would find "Releas 1.0.12 works until of 10. April 2012 !" [sic] which is exactly what the text box shows when you open the plugin.

Allrightallright - for the Windows people: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=42469

Not being smart but only Google SU have that knowledge. They don't announce any roadmap so you won't find possible release dates anywhere. I'm fairly sure not even beta testers have that knowledge. Since we've just gotten M2 I imagine v9 is a bit of a wait. Always nice to have something to look forward to.

hi john2, I'm not sure I'm understanding what your having issues with, but if you want to re-use the same profile somewhere else. click into your group [edit mode] >> 'select' the profile face >> 'copy' >> click outside group >> 'paste in place' >> 'make [new] group >> move it to new location >> copy paste the path into the 'new profile group' >> use 'follow me' not sure if you follow me... john

Thanks Thomas

are you on the chaosgroup website? If not, you should be - as you can read any of Fernando's (user name fpedrogo) posts and you will come away knowing more. You really should watch some of his tutorials, valerostudio has pointed them out already. edit: added user name

@escapeartist said: Nope, haven't seen it. Guess I'm gonna have to! [image: shocked.jpg]

I can honestly say that thomthoms solid inspector plugin turned SU from a program that I used to use sometimes into a program that I now use almost daily.

All the manuals that exist for VR4SU live here http://spot3d.com/

I would imagine you can get most things in one layer. There are many map slots available for the different aspects of reflections. I know some of the metal materials use two layers because there are two different IOR values used. Is there a particular example you are working on?

...Happy New Year !