Oh, that's a blow. Is an edge not a line (clearly not)?

What would you do if you were me? Cutting grooves instead of lines might be possible but fiddly. Do other render apps render lines?

Is it beneficial to have Sketchup pro for Vray? Are there any benefits?

I'm playing with the Vray demo on an outdoor scene. The floor is decking and in Sketchup you can see the lines of the individual deckboards. When I render, the deckboards turn to one uniform flat surface, which is obviously undesirable. Is there a setting I can play with so that the deckboards render realistically?

A tree I imported from the 3D warehouse throws its shadow counter to the rest of the model, which is obviously completely unpresentable. Any idea why, or better still how to change that?

Moving objects is proving extremely tedious because SU thinks I want to use inferences, most of which are completely useless and cause the objects to fly off all over the place. It's too damn helpful for its own good. Is there any way to avoid inferencing when using the move tool?

I want to model an egg with shell, with its top sliced off, or rather broken randomly, like a cartoon-style zig zag.
I get as far as making an oval and then get stuck. Basically I don't know how to get the shell with real thickness and also cut into a curved surface.

In this context, what difference between Explde and Edit Group?

Thanks for replying. My steps are/were:
Create grid using From Scratch tool, grid space 1000mm. Grid about 10000mm x 10000mm.
Explode group.
Select Smoove. Radius to 1000mm.
Pull up terrain.

Now it works. Before I had the yellow markers over the whole area, not just across the circle. Bug perhaps?

Smoove tool doesn't work. I create a grid from scratch. Explode the grid. Select Smoove tool and hover over the grid, but instead of a circle I just get the whole grid lit up yellow. I've tried changing the radius in the VCB from 30mm up to 30,000mm but no circle appears for Smoove pulling.

Thanks Jeff, sorted. And Gaieus too!

Has anybody got any idea why I can't access materials?

I have a new MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard and Sketchup files which worked fine on my desktop (running Leopard) won't load materials or colors in model into the materials palette.
The materials I have already assigned beforehand show up in the model, but are not available to choose again or edit. All I have is the eyedropper to resuse, which is obviously of little use.
When I select Materials in the Windows dropdown, I just get the basic color palette with the color wheel etc. No thumbnails of colors in model etc.
In app support/sketchup the materials folder is present and its contents are there. They just don't appear in the workspace.