Ah. It's that whole paying-attention-to-what's-directly-in-front-of-me thing...

thanks Dave R - most of the rbzs I've installed didn't require that step to work, and I missed it. Thanks for your patience and help, it's much appreciated.

Placed the Sketchucation Tool rbz in my plugins folder and it doesn't seem to appear anywhere when I start sketchup. This is not my week. Maybe my being on version 8.0.11752 is the trouble.

Thanks TIG - I'll have another go at it with careful attention to those instructions...

Those look wonderful. Thanks again, I will definitely get to working with those tools!

You took a moment to help - sure, I'm happy to say 'thanks.' I did find a suitable tool earlier but the response is still appreciated!

thanks Kristoff!

In the end it turned out that there was a mass of dust that had basically become compressed into a block of felt, obstructing the cooling vents in such a way as to be -very- difficult to see save from just the right angle. So, mystery solved. Thanks guys!

Thanks! Just getting into working with curviloft now, which looks very useful. Advice and images much appreciated.

So what happened above was the result of installing the Curviloft_Dir_12 with all files contained in it, in the 'plugins' folder.

Extracting the files contained in the Curviloft_Dir_12 to the plugins folder resulted in -this- error message on starting sketchup:

Error Loading File bootstrap_Curviloft.rb
uninitialized constant Curviloft::T6Error Loading File CurviloftAlgo.rb
uninitialized constant Curviloft::T6Error Loading File CurviloftCurveMover.rb
uninitialized constant Curviloft::T6Error Loading File CurviloftPalette.rb
uninitialized constant Curviloft::T6Error Loading File CurviloftTool.rb
uninitialized constant Curviloft::T6

So...that's different. But still not helpful.

This plugin looks like just the thing for what I need to do in Sketchup Pro 8 (version 8.0.11752, running under Windows XP Pro ) but when I install it and then start sketchup I get the following message:

Error Loading File bootstrap_Curviloft.rb
uninitialized constant Curviloft::T6

Sketchup then opens and appears to run normally, but the curviloft plugin does not appear.

Any thoughts on how to get this install to work? Curviloft looks like a real life-saver, if only I can get it working...

thanks,
karl

Hey all. I am looking for a useful - and of course ideally free - plugin that will work with Sketchup 8 to help create long, stringy, ropey, cable-y etc type geometry. I'm trying Aerilius' WireTool plugin, which is for creating caternary curves (like a line or rope hanging between two anchor points at the ends) but need something useful for creating runs and bundles of cable etc that run along irregular paths in 3 dimensions (think conduit that snakes its way through the guts of an engine, or something).

Of course this can be done manually by creating paths and running sections of the desired cables along it using the 'follow me' tool but I'm hoping for something a bit more tune-able and automated.

thanks!

Thanks guys! I'll check and see, and try underclocking the CPUs...

So when using sketchup - and the problem is generally more apparent with larger files - my notebook tends to overheat to the point of automatically shutting down (usually in the middle of something intricate, of course).

The machine has never displayed this overheating problem when running Lightwave, Rhino, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, or any other applications that one might suspect of taxing the graphics and processor hardware.

Is anyone else noticing this? And - aside from lots and lots of fans, and sometimes cups full of ice chips - does anyone know of ways to address the problem?

UPDATE: After the usual purging, check for un-needed hidden geometry, removal of lurking layers, etc the file size is basically unaffected by removal of half the geometry...

...but if one copies the remaining (that is, desired)geometry into a fresh, empty iteration of sketchup and saves -that-, one winds up with a properly-sized file interms of what's been cut (that is, a 64MB file rather than a 128MB file containing the identical geometry.

Still, given that the fbx original was only 23MB to start with, the resulting 64MB file still seems excessively large (though at least it's now useful for something).

Does anyone know if skp files are just always inherently larger than fbx files describing the same object?

Hey All -

Having trouble with fbx files brought into sketchup via Simlabs' FBX Importer.

Here's the message I sent along to SimLab: perhaps someone can make sense of the trouble before they do...

Dear Sirs:

I'm running sketchup Pro 8 Version 8.0.11752 on a Windows XP Pro V2002 SP3 system, Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9650 @ 3HGz, 1.97 GHz 3.25 GB RAM.

I find that fbx files brought into sketchup via Simlabs' importer tend to be disproportionately large - a 23MB fbx file is 128MB by the time it opens in sketchup, and sketchup does not very much like to run around 128MB files. Load times and save times are terribly lengthy, and while working with the imported model the system constantly seizes and locks - for example, cutting out a single object representing about half of the total geometry in the scene is a 1-hour-plus process: unacceptable in a production environment.

If you have any suggestions as to how I might employ your importer to obtain smaller skp file sizes at the end of the process I would be very grateful.

sincerely,

etc

Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated.

thanks!