This plugin is AWESOME! Must buy for sure. I accidentally stumbled across it and knew I needed to purchase and install. Unlike many of the posts here and in the other PB threads I've noticed, I had no issues purchasing or installing (into skp 2015 pro), and have had no crashing with it. I do have some comments in no particular order:

A way to submit assemblies & profiles to someone would be nice. You say they can be found on the 3d warehouse, but I'm not sure how to find them other than using yours from your site.

No way to apply materials to a profile from within the assembly editor

No way to orient materials applied to profiles other than to create new materials (not ideal)

Some of the labels have obscure meanings. (Up/down offset is just elevation by another name?)

The profile/assembly search windows do not show folders (makes it tedious to organize profiles & assemblies by a type logical to me, and I'd prefer not to sort through thousands of profiles/assemblies every time I want to find one), and could use some extra navigation features (forward/back arrow).

The 'search' icon should probably be an 'open' icon

The way the preview is generated is obscure to me. Sometimes it focuses on what I'm editing, sometimes not, sometimes it just doesn't do what I want it to and I don't know why.

The "apply assembly attributes" and "edit member properties" buttons have the same iconography, but do slightly different things. Personally, I'm not sure the little popup window for profiles is useful, maybe replace it with a "apply profile attributes" (exactly the same as the assembly button) and add a button that brings the window back up as a kind of eyedropper tool allowing the user to select what profile (or maybe assembly!) attributes to eyedrop.

I'd be nice to be able to adjust the profiles used from within the assembly dialogue. Especially for their start points, rotation, etc.

A couple (non-breaking) glitches I've noticed:

Hitting enter on data entry in any box doesn't do anything. You need to switch to the next box to get the data to apply. - Especially important when building assemblies, as it's tricky to figure out whether I've moved something the correct distance.

Pushing the arrows on the profile in the assembly window on a loaded assembly allows you to go infinitely beyond the number of profiles in the assembly. I think it happens when you've selected a profile that exists in one assembly, load a new assembly with fewer profiles, and then try to cycle through them.

And some wishlist items:

It seems like this is so close to being able to do all things parametric. If it worked in 2 dimensions (instead of just linearly), I can see using it to generate any-height walls, windows, doors, etc. etc. (Right now, I'd need to make a new assembly for each window/door height. Not the end of the world, but more work than I'd like to do).

Making it so the tool can cut assemblies (possibly using solid tools) would make windows & doors very easy.

Allowing me to draw a thing using profiles and components and translate them to an assembly would be awesome.

(Sorry if this is a bump, but this seems to be the main thread)

@unknownuser said:

Boeing A380 created in sketchup by me.

Boeing does not manufacture the A380 - it's an Airbus design. Airbus being another (competing) manufacturer.

Looks like interesting stuff. You might have already heard about it, but there is a page here:http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/ which has quite a bit of interesting hard-science information for sci-fi authors.

@solo said:

Anyone ever see the episode of Extreme engineering where they discussed the possibility of a tunnel from New York to Paris and London?

Instead of the vacuum based Idea in order to reach the 4000 Mph as they discussed, this is more realistic using Maglev technology (Magnetic levitation) in a closed tunnel speeds up to 1200 Mph can be achieved.
The tunnel will be buoyant and secured/braced to the sea floor, pressure levels controlled by computer for stability. ...

Wait, how are they planning on breaking the sound barrier inside of a tunnel WITHOUT using vacuum? Won't that run riot on the structural calcs, with a moving wave of sonic booms running the length of the thing in different directions?

And if they built it NYC to Paris/London, everyone not in the NE US would need to fly to the station, which can completely negate the travel time saved over the Atlantic (Seattle to London - 9 hours. Seattle to NYC then 3 hours on sea-train - 10 hours). Especially when you could just send super-sonic jets over the ocean at higher speeds, lower (initial) cost, and with greater frequently.

@fester225 said:

I have 22 layers in use at the moment, but that seems reasonable considering that I'm doing a mechanical drawing. If 22 layers is a problem, perhaps we need a fix.

From what I've done, having lots of layers (a recently imported Civil drawing, for example) by itself does glitch the program occasionally, but it doesn't really slow it down on it's own. If I import a multi-mile area drawing with tons of edges, but still under ~10 megs and has no other features (and I've turned off profiles) the model should still manipulate fine, but every once in a while it'll hang for no apparent reason. That's when I realize I left too many layers in the model and purge them out (since Civil drawings always have too many layers for what I'm doing). Having 10 or 20 or even more layers should never be a problem by itself if the rest of the model is small enough, and it sounds like for you that is true. Just make sure you're using groups and layering them instead of model geometry- geometry in sketchup doesn't like being on separate layers (You move a line on layer "A" and the connected face on hidden layer "B" still moves with it).

As for Hieru's remarks on this being an issue inherent to the software and a bug that we're solving the symptoms of, I'd say that is only half true, but completely fair. The software was not meant to do what many of us are doing with it; though as our friendly neighborhood guide Jody has pointed out- the engineers didn't put the limitations in on purpose, so that we could push its limits.

However, the untrue part is that you don't have any other software that is constantly rendering your model at all times like Sketchup is trying to do. I use Revit, Blender, Maya, PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, CAD, and Sketchup, and of those, Sketchup is the only one constantly rendering everything all the time. While Revit, Blender, and Maya will all show shading and perhaps even textures, they usually only display basic model geometry. Revit can show shadows in a working window, but it slows it down to a grinding halt, much more so than I've experienced with Sketchup on equivalently-sized models. PhotoShp and the others don't really render anything, CAD often staggers at silly things like "hatches" and "lines," while zooming in a good Photoshop file with filters and blending modes can take some time on my machine. So, in order to make Sketchup do what I want, I turn off the "rendering" options - lines with weights, styles, shadows, textures, etc.

I do similar things in all the programs, the only difference is that Sketchup starts out with many of it's most processor-intensive rendering options turned on and there isn't a one-click "Draw" mode, which I think every other program I listed has.

I typically create files in the 10-70 meg range, with anywhere from 250,000-4,000,000+ edges and 50,000-1,000,000 faces. I usually experience slowdown when using shadows, textures, large numbers of components (in otherwise small models), more than a certain number of layers (I'm not positive how many it is, but it seems that 10 is about the safe limit), and styles.

One file I'm looking at is roughly 10 megs, but has 4.33 Million edges and almost One Million faces, with 550,000 component instances, 1000 groups, 350 separate components, 10 layers, 263 materials, and 8 styles. It takes awhile to load, sometimes freezes up, but if it loads up works fine as long as I've got "working" settings on, which turn off most of the components, shadows, and uses shaded mode.
Another is 60 megs with less than One million edges and works fine with shadows on. I'm pretty sure that anything can make a model slow, but that it really takes an absurd upper limit to hit that- it's not necessarily file size or number of textures or faces or any one thing in particular.

And I'm running a relatively old Dual-core HP workstation with 2 gigs of RAM.

I believe therefore that the biggest problem for new users is 5 fold:
1) They don't understand or know how to use components properly.
2) They leave shadows/textures/xray on all the time
3) They import from cad and don't purge unnecessary data (esp. layers)
4) They don't use scenes to control styles and cameras.
5) They don't use styles properly- and this is the most important part- because the Sketchup default settings are not the most efficient.

What I mean by #5 is that the 'default' Sketchup style is something that uses profiles, has a colored background, and maybe takes advantage of some other rendering options (I'm not sure what all it's got going on because I NEVER use it). I use one of the last templates- "plan view- feet and inches" or "plan view- metric," because they are the fastest and most efficient. For me, the profiles and other edge effects are KILLER on any file, and will quickly make it impossible to get any work done. However, you can use those "style" settings, you just have to load up the file in a plain view and then turn them on.

Long story short: Make a tab without any style options (shadows, profiles, depth cue, edge effects, x-ray, textures [shaders are ok], or sky/ground colors) turned on for working in. Also disable (by making groups or components and then placing them in layers) any high-poly count objects, such as trees & foliage, cars, possibly the ground, people, etc.. Save the model with this tab open, and make additional tabs for rendered views and cameras and everything should be ok.

That isn't an oreo cookie. Twilight with milk preset.

Also, it's my first post.

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