Thanks Ridix
I modelled them onto the the drawing as no features are painted. The mouth and all other flat coloured areas on the face are seperate fabric pieces. They're modelled merely for reference on what eventually becomes the template. (he's 6m in length)
I did attempt drawing his fingers, but my skills are sorely lacking at present to be able to create a design that can be translated to an adequate 2d fabric pattern.
But there is more experimentation on using basic curved sketchup shaped to see what happens to them when they're flattened out.
It's all good.

He got his first maiden launch today - daggy test bridling lines included. The big multicolour kite behind him is his lifter, Felix is hoisted up on its line.
Here's a pic of his intitial design in sketchup which I guess is probably vastly different to typical sketchup 3d applications, he turned out pretty good tho I thought.

His feet and the hand stub were removed and created manually on a paper mockup. Nose and eyes were also changed using more simplified gore shaped designs.

Overall, I'm really pleased that fully inflated and pretty well straight from the drawing board and under the sewing machine, fabric puckers are pretty minimal. Using curved designs like this, I will have to remember to build in curves where a typically cartoon ball 3d design can't flatten on 2d.
By the way, his tail will be lengthened, cause it does look kinda uh, rude as it is.

Yep, problem here as well. Nvidia on an hp notebook, sketchup freezes completely. I did actually manage to fix it one time, by turning the card to slow mode, but it don't wanna play that game again. Will look for updated drivers as suggested and await the next version I guess.

Hi
Been dabbling with sketchup for a few months now (learning mostly) as an aid for pattern creation when making large inflatable objects, namely kite line laundry.
So far off the drawing board has been a 2m ground display spider, which wasn't hugely successful, but not bad, a slightly better 2m carrot top - another ground anchored inflatable. Going out for testing this weekend hopefully is a 6m felix the cat, which was pretty well entirely drawn up in sketchup 'cept for his hands and feet.
I havn't been able to find any designing software that was affordable and could do what I wanted in one complete package. Using sketchup certainly is affordable costing nothing and once I've drawn something up, it is exported into Pepakura http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/ to create the fabric pattern. in most cases the whole process goes thru about 4 different programs from go to whoa.
While not a perfect solution for what I use it for, as I get better at using sketchup and manipulating it for pattern template making, there is definitely a lot of promise there.
cheers
JoL