@woodarc said:

How can you retain visible section cut when returning to a Scene that was saved showing section cut active? 'Active Section Plane' is checked in the Scene dialogue window.
When an attempt is made the view shuts off section view! I hope it makes sense.

I think it could be a style problem. You're using different styles for the scenes, with and without the cut?

@tig said:

You have three materials called '$Irr Cache', '$Light Sprite' and 'glas'.
If I purge those [now unused] the issue stops, suggesting it related to the materials messing with the SKP's data-base - although 'fix_issues' does nothing !

Very oddly... if leave the unused components in the SKP... but I 'Delete' any one of those three materials from the Materials Browser, that fixes the issue.
Deleting any one of them resolves it - as if something in the Materials data-base is foobar !

A non-destructive solution [in case you want to use the components/materials later on] is to add a new material to the Model with the Material Browser's '+' button - this immediately fixes the phantom-shadow issue [ ], even when that new material is unused - then you can just Delete that unwanted material from the Materials Browser - the fix is not reversed by that. This 'material-add' seems to jolt the Model's Material data-base into normality, which in turn stops the phantom-shadow issue

It is VERY weird !

Thank for your reply TIG. '$Irr Cache', '$Light Sprite' are materials created by LightUp every time I open a file in SketchUp.

I tried your suggestions but they only seem to temporary 'fix' the problem.

1. Purge all materials so only the default material is left: after a few scene changes, it's back
2. create a new material. At that moment it's 'fixed' but after a few scene changes it's back.

very strange...indeed.

@krisidious said:

That's ground level isn't it? I can't tell as the file is 14 and I don't have that.

It's not ground level. The ghosted shadows are visible only when there's geometry behind it. With just the background behind the ghost - it's gone.

I can't reproduce it in SU2013 so must be new.

I just noticed a bug that sometimes happens in SU2014.

Shadow artifacts appear when changing to scenes with a section cut while shadows are on. These scenes only have an 'active selection planes' property. If I rotate the 'bugged' view it seems like the part that's been cut off is ghosted.

Once this happens, the only option is to toggle 'display section cuts' to 'fix' it. I tested the same file in SU2013 and I can't reproduce it there.

I made a simple file to check if was a problem with my current project but I can reproduce it in the simple file (see attachment) as well. Just switch scenes several times and after a few times the ghosted shadows appear, very visible when rotating the view.

sectionShadowArtifacts.skp

@alex84 said:

...I am close to insanity... ...

Just wanted to add...

A trick if the booleans start to fail is to use 'intersect with selected' instead of boolean-subtract. Copy the resulting intersection lines into the base-solid and manually start deleting / adding faces.
If the original shape is already quite complex, copy the cutter and only the faces that would be affected by the boolean subtraction above the model and do the intersection there. It's sometimes much faster.

Booleans were a great addition to Sketchup but, as Alex wrote, the operations fail often once the model gets slightly more complex. Especially now when 3d printing gets more popular every day, some new attention to booleans would be very welcome or people will have to look elsewhere.

My 2 cents (easy for me to ask - I have no knowledge how big a task this list would be):

• refine the algorithms so that more complex models would still work.
• add some new functions that speed up the work like: make solid (closed volume enclosed by several planes - even curved planes), slice by plane (even curved planes), round selected edges (we have a great plugin by Fredo for that but with more complex boolean models the plugin won't always work - would be nice if this could be possible somehow)
• remove the necessity for having to scale the model for booleans to work correctly
• don't rename the boolean outcome to 'union etc' but leave the original name, maybe only add a suffix like a&b if the outcome are different parts.

greetings, Max

As far as I know Lightup can't do SSS so I used some liquid material settings instead because the glass didn't look nice. Rendering time 2 minutes 30 seconds. Maybe Adam himself has a trick for making it look more like glass?

Could it be the 'large tool set' is less than 2 columns wide?

I try to put some icons in 2 columns under the large tool set and whatever I do I always end up with 3 columns. If I remove the large toolset it's fine but as soon as I put it back... 3 columns.

edit: also tried making a custom 2 column toolbar but as soon as I dock it, it reverts to a long one-column toolbar again.

@tig said:

All a WorkPlane is, is a large transparent face with a guide-line grid, locked into place, to assist you in drawing in that plane - useful when you do not have faces or other geometry etc to inference onto.
If does not magically 'constrain' the cursor [unlike my 2dTools which limit geometry to a flat plane with a specified Z].
You can draw 'away' from a WorkPlane at any time - as you have found.

Thanks for your reply TIG. I was mistaken and was wrongly expecting the workplane would magically 'constrain' the cursor like in your 2dTools. My fault.

@tig said:

Do you make the WorkPlane big enough to draw onto ?
It does NOT constrain the input points from other tools onto the plane, if they are OUTSIDE of the WorkPlane's perimeter...
Workplane is big enough indeed. See attached file.

workplane.skp

Hello TIG,

I'm trying out Workplane in SU2014. I think it isn't always working as intended. For instance when drawing a rectangle and sometimes even simple lines on a angular workplane - they are drawn on the world-xy plane instead.

greetings, Max

@steveo said:

the grass is all 2d images but still this computer should find this easy especially when the task manager says memory and cpu usage is as low as it is

828.000 edges, 280.000 faces, 59.000 component instances and 118.000 groups - those are all quite large numbers for Sketchup. You can read some posts here on the forum of people who are running into similar difficulties because their models are getting too large for Sketchup to handle even though they have powerful computers. The only solution for now is to build your model differently so Sketchup can keep up again.

I'm just guessing here (I have no knowledge at all about Sketchup's engine) but by creating that many groups/components with only a few entities in each group/component, the software has a hard time sorting through them once you try to open just 1 group.

Can't you combine groups and components into much larger structures so the number of entities in each group/component is much higher (x 100 or x 1000)and the total amount of groups/components is much lower (/ 100 or / 1000)?!

Hello SteveO,

With those stats (those are the numbers for 'entire model' and 'show nested' just to be sure?) I don't see why Sketchup would be slow.

Maybe it's the texture size that's causing problems? Any difference if you change display options to 'shaded' instead of 'shaded with textures' ? Any difference by turning off shadows?

Did you try hiding specific objects in your scene to determine which one is causing the problem?

@steveo said:

...Is anyone able to help me gain performance?

Just to be sure: you enabled 'use hardware acceleration' in window-preferences-openGL?

Also: can you share some more details about the statistics of the model?

For speed enhancements while editing groups/components, did you try: window- model info - components - check both hide options?

ps I'm not familiar with your specific gfx-card but people used to say Nvidia cards were the way to go for Sketchup. Not sure if that's still the case though and what were the exact reasons for this.

@andku85 said:

is there a way to do this as well in sketchup or use a plugin? or will i have to scale the object and manually add the cut line?

It should be easy manually with the use a few plugins:

1. scale object
2. use Zorro plugin to cut the object in parts
3. heal the sectioncuts (by hand or Makefaces plugin) so the parts become solids again
4. export stl

@tt_su said:

The Outliner will let you jump directly in and out of the model hierarchy.

I know, I use it all the time but using a keypress is a bit more quick than moving the pen to the outliner and back again.

@jim said:

Paste this into a file with the .rb extension in your plugins folder.

> UI.add_context_menu_handler {|menu|
>   menu.add_item("Close All Contexts") {
>     Sketchup.active_model.selection.clear
>     while (Sketchup.active_model.close_active); end
>   }
> }
> 

Thanks a lot! Those few lines of code make working with more complex object trees much easier.

Why not put the object(s) and a ruler on a scanner. That way no lens distortion is causing problems.

Import image in Sketchup - scale image, trace etc.

I use layout very often as well but V2014 works fine for me.

Could you share some details about your gfx card and drivers? Maybe upload the layout file?

@tig said:

Archiver is one of a few scripts that doesn't work in v2014, because they completely changed how model.save works... It IS on my list of things to fix...

Great TIG. Much appreciated.