I assume you different/unique'd materials on some faces. If you go to the "In Model" category of your materials window, you will see all the materials present. These will be exported with the fbx. You can right click + delete to get rid of them, and just paint the whole thing with a single texture.

It sounds like maybe you didn't click to confirm your account if they sent you an email?

Anyways, the crash could be any number of things. If it's happening at regular intervals, I feel like it could be autosave going wrong? (you can disable this in preferences). Reinstalling is always a good fallback, I find it helps 90% of the time.

I can't help you with the code, I don't know Sketchup's API very well at all, but as for a starting point for learning...

http://learnrubythehardway.org/book/

I used this to learn the basics of ruby, and I thoroughly reccomend it.

The clipping in sketchup is one of the most frustratingly long-standing issues around. Try switching your camera to perspective, that usually works as a quick fix.

I don't believe this is currently possible... I'd also be very interested to know if there is a way

In vanilla sketchup:
-You can create a face in the correct orientation, texture that, set the texture to "projected", and use the texture from that to paint your model

with plugins:
-Pixero's UV Projection plugin might help you out here, it will speed up the approach I described for vanilla
-Marginal's UV editor could also work nicely, albeit with a little more effort
-I haven't used ThomThom's UV toolkit, but I believe it could present a solution of some description

This is a decent guide
http://www.thomthom.net/thoughts/2012/12/sketchup-dwg-import-guide/

By the lines "stacking", do you mean they're occupying the same space and therefore merging? If so, I would try exporting and importing the offending contours separately, grouping them once they're in sketchup to avoid intersections. Alternatively, if it doesn't occur too much, you could cut (ctrl-x) the section, separate the contours, and paste it back in for each contour.

acid3D

For modeling, I use a software called The Plant Factory, but it's a little on the pricey side. SpeedTree is very similar (better in some areas, worse in others), and is available on a monthly subscription for much less money.

You can then go on to export, and render in whatever software you want.

It's important to remember that a large portion (the majority, I'd think) of the users on this site, including plugin authors, are not natively English - and for those that are, chances are they developed the plugin for personal use, so documentation isn't a priority for them.

That aside, the sketchucation forums are some of the most active and helpful I've ever come across. If you need help understanding a plugin, just drop a post and someone will get back to you within a day, like as not

Does anybody know whether curviloft takes face direction into account? You might want to reverse the last two faces if so, to keep all faces oriented along the curve.

@jeff hammond said:

did you put a light inside or are the windows emitters? or something else?

If I haven't misunderstood, he's got the yellow component nested inside, and made the yellow material an emitter.

They change the person every release... it's just a tradition, a different member of the sketchup team gets made into the figure every time.

curvizard has a tool called "smooth contours". It basically just smooths your curves. If that ends up being too high res, you can also run simplify contours to get the edge count down before you generate the terrain.

Drivers seem to be the most likely issue but if that's not it, try out the smooth zoom plugin (I forget who wrote it). Just a stab in the dark but it might work.

edit: otherwise just hit "z" for zoom. There won't be much of a difference in time/effort if you get used to it. I feel like there's another way to zoom with the mouse, but I can't remember and couldn't find it by experimenting, so maybe I'm imagining it.

So you're trying to enter a component by clicking on its axis? I don't think there's an inbuilt way of doing that, but a ruby script could generate a cross in each component at the axis, if that's what you want to do.

Honestly unless you're doing stuff with dynamics, the orientation of the components isn't incredibly important, you probably don't need to worry about it.

animated images on planes would be the way to go. Other than that, you could maybe do something with a blender particle system.

@jeff hammond said:

@jakeypoos said:

make a real, accurate place rather than a fantasy backdrop.

i thought you could model to scale in maya?
(but then again, i've never used it)

Sort of. Not well. It's not a software made for construction documents and plans like SU and CAD are. It is very good at making things that look good, thus its use in the animation/vfx industry (where precision in dimensioning is pretty much irrelevant), but accuracy is not its forté.

Think of it like a graphite stick, and SU as a mechanical pencil. I suppose that would make zbrush and mudbox paintbrushes? Sure, that analogy works.

Are you using a specific software to print?

It's not better. It's different. The sketchup workflow is very good for precise non-organic modeling. You wanna make a house? Sketchup's your friend. Cars? Ehhh not so much, I'd prefer maya for a car. People? Good luck coming up with a fast way to model good people in SU.
Edit: modeling aside, SU just isn't practical for many of the applications for which maya/max/blender are, and vice versa.