Mike, it's a bit fallacious to try and discredit Derei based on him not paying for a pro license... Your arguments have a good point, but let's leave the one-upmanship out of it?

For my part, I'll say that I don't think the price rise will help Trimble - it will just drive people away from pro. They'd do better to leave the price as is, imo, or even look into dropping it to entice those sitting on the fence.

@dave r said:

And make sure to correct the face orientation.

Nah, it's an antihandle. Just don't put it anywhere near a handle, or they'll annihilate eachother

^lofting works

Alternatively, if you wanted to be able to do something like this quickly, you can follow-me to create the basic shape, then scale the ends like so:

I think the reason you're getting the default material changing is probably that you are applying materials to groups, components, etc. - if you back right out to the full model context, you should find that the default material is still as standard. You can fix this by reapplying the default material to your groups (you can select default up in the top right of the materials pallette).

This isn't a glitch, and is very useful sometimes, but it isn't a particularly helpful feature if you're dealing with anything that differentiates between back and front faces - I wonder if there's a plugin to give all containers the default material?

You don't really need a dedicated plugin for this - solid tools and joint push pull's follow extrusion will do you fine (and the follow extrusion is a little overkill, honestly, it can be done with vanilla sketchup just fine)

edit: excuse the buggy gif, at least it's still decipherable I suppose

@axton213 said:

decent 3D modelling

That be fightin' talk

In all seriousness though, yeah using sketchup for game-ready modeling is not an efficient use of available tools, to say the least. This thread kinda devolved into what was more fun to use, though, which is ridiculously subjective and not even worth talking about in a forum full of sketchup users.

No, you would not. Dynamic attributes are a feature of sketchup only. Sorry :S

Nothing necessitates the updating of older plugins, if that's what you're worried about... You have total control over what plugins are installed. If you're adamant on not using the plugins folder (again, you really should, that's what it's there for), Garry K details a method here http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15%26amp;t=62487#p572162 - although you still shouldn't use the tools folder in this case

Could you please clarify what the file type is? .fbx and .obj are very different formats...

Pretty sure he doesn't own gumroad, just saying...

It's possible to natively export a dwg with correct layers, as long as you put the raw geometry on its respective layers (ew). This is done using the 3D export, though - I don't believe the native 2D export supports layers.

I was getting into flowify the other day - really powerful stuff, I can see no end of possible applications.

Elisei is right. Like this:

excuse the selection gore

Really minor but... the measurements box could use a caret to mark where you're typing. As is, I have to go by feel + trial and error if I want to change something I'm inputting.

You could simply uninstall older versions, or if you absolutely need to keep them installed, unpin them from the taskbar (right click, unpin) and delete their desktop shortcuts. You can then access it through the start menu (the quickest way is just to hit start and then type sketchup to get a list of all installed versions of sketchup)

First, if it bug splats, send the error report, and ideally open a support ticket including a file with the problem so they can take a look. This is the way that bugs (eventually) get fixed, though obviously that's not going to help you in the short term.

I have no idea what the actual problem is, but here are some vague things that may help you:
Reboot your PC. It works more often than it should.
Play around with your SketchUp preferences, there might be something in there causing a problem.
Download and run CCleaner, it will wipe your caches, that might help if you're lucky.
Reinstall SketchUp.
Check your hardware, there are various utilities online for different components. It's unlikely, but faulty hardware is a possible cause.

If I understand the question correctly, you want to be able to rotate the component, but only a certain distance? You can just use a conditional statement.
Angle = if(inputAngle<maxAngle, inputAngle, maxAngle)

If you wanted to actually be using the rotate tool, you could nest the component within a shell, and have the nested component compensate when the shell's rotation exceeds the max rotation. I don't think you can have a single rotation attribute constrained with a formula and still be able to directly alter it with the rotation tool, unfortunately.

Projection will cause distortion at the extremities of the cylinder, so it maybe isn't the best idea for any graphics/decals that aren't decently central, unless you want to start sectioning off areas for different projections. Other than that, yeah projection will work in OP's instance, it was probably overkill for me to suggest UV tools.

Search on the plugin store for the term "UV".
There are a number of plugins, most of which will help you to do this, to do with UV layout and texture projection - sketchup's own capabilities in this regard are unfortunately lacking, to say the least.

Dynamic components cannot achieve this. Scripting might, crudely, if one could write a script linking the visibility of the box to the relationship between the camera, plane, and box, but you'd need it constantly running if you wanted it to update in real time, which sounds pretty inefficient to me.

What precisely are you trying to achieve? Could the section tool help you in any way?