@jackieboyharpster apparently, you are trying to do it with 4 curves selected using the "loft by splines" command, this is clearly user error.
Just delete the 2 straight segments (and the attached existing face of course), then select only the 2 arcs and run the command again.

This is insanely great!

It's 99,9% related to clipping planes tolerance

To troubleshoot this you can type in Ruby console

Sketchup.send_action 10624

Then in the windows which will pop up, check the "Force" flag and try to play a bit with "Near" and "Far" parameters.

If the "Model Far" is a really huge number compared to the actual expected size of the model (causing the "Far" clipping plane to be REALLY FAR, then you can have that kind of floating-point-precision-related z-fights happening like in your screenshot).

There are a few reasons that can trigger this kind of behavior (which is the pretty much the opposite of the well known "clipping problem").

Usually there's something REALLY FAR from axes origin (maybe a tiny stray segment miles away from world 0,0,0 or possibly you accidentally created a misplaced copy of your 3d text which for whatever reason ended up at light years distance from model space).
In that case you can try to select whatever should actually be in your "intended" model (maybe temporarily group & lock it for added safety), then invert the selection and erase whatever else is in the model (this will clean up accidentally misplaced geometry that you can't see because it ended up into some different solar system) and everything should be fine.

Another possible reason is that some of the objects in the model is actually in the right place, but its internal coordinate system has the origin miles away from model origin. In that case you can troubleshoot that looking at object bounding boxes or if you want to fix that super-fast, just install the "Axes Tool" plugin from Thomthom and recursively select components and sub-components and run the tool in order to place the object's axes in the center of the bounding box. Being that you apparently have just a few objects, you could just try to explode and regroup them one by one and that could fix the problem.

Another reason which comes into my mind that can trigger this kind of glitches, is when you have some "giant" component and you scaled it insanely small compared to the original size.. in that case you can try to "scale definition" (or, again, just explode and regroup it) and that should fix the problem in such specific case. If you created your 3d text insanely big and you scaled it a lot, that could be the culprit.

If none of this fixes works, maybe you can share the model and I could try to see what's goin'on exactly.

@tomb85 Oh shit.. never noticed that.. I'm just creating a plugin which relies quite heavily on the tab key to switch between modes.. maybe I should add a Shift+TAB option in order to stay safe. Good to know.

@lapx said in ALL THINGS AI:

Is anyone using ai

If you mean "doing AI rendering and modeling", nope.
If you mean "using it in order to setup reminders on phone or read email for me".. nope.
If you mean "use it to code some specific plugin or automation which I can then use in order to do some manual work"... absolutely yes.

@optimaforever man, check your n inbox

@alsomar said in [Plugin] QuadFaceTools:

You see the model unsmoothed in 3ds Max just because your SketchUp model has unsmoothed lines. Despite the SubD subdivisions making the surface look smooth, if you can see the edges it means the lines are actually unsmoothed. In this frame I can see all the lines

Nope.
They are soft = false; smooth = true.

The smooth attribute is the one actually welding the normals/creating smoothing groups.
The soft is a Sketchup-thing only to separate "logical surfaces" which can be selected with a single click.

In the legacy version of the exporter, the generated obj from 3dsMax was seen as 2 overlapped meshes: one with the properly welded/smoothed quads (BUT unwelded UV seams between each quad, despite the individual quads being perfectly in place in the UV chart) + one made of floating/unwelded triangles.

In Blender the legacy exporter always worked fine (didn't test your fork against Blender, but I guess it could work fine).

Another weird/interesting thing is that the same objects, when exported straight out of WrapR work 100% fine.

@alsomar the floating triangles are gone, but still a few normal welding issue and unwelded UVs.

@alsomar ok, I'm going to test it against Max (using a model which I'm sure gave me problems in the past), gimme a moment.

@alsomar Thanks Alejandro, I'll try this as soon as possible.
Where do you tested the fix?
Rizom? 3dsMax?
Which modules sre involved? The exporter_obj.rb only?

I myself have a slightly "hacked" version of QFT (mainly to use png icons which are better on my laptop with Sketchup 2021 rather than the new svg ones) so I would probably prefer to merge only the strictly necessary modules.

@Rich-O-Brien said in SketchyPhysics 3.5.6 (26 January 2015):

is a huge undertaking

Of course I was thinking about "cheat-coding"

@Dave-R said in SketchyPhysics 3.5.6 (26 January 2015):

Sketch Physics hasn't been updated in over ten years

Is that open source? Maybe in that case it can be updated to fit the new ruby/API rules?

@Rich-O-Brien said in SubD examples and models:

I would even say his tool is better than the Italian Rugby team

I don't give a shit about rugby but I'm 100% sure my tool is way better than last year Fuwrawry car

@HornOxx said in SubD examples and models:

And then in such an accurate form

That's exactly where the plugin I'm developing in my spare time comes into play

@HornOxx said in SubD examples and models:

I wonder how you made that second, very tricky ball

The attached model includes the main stages.

A couple of spherical topology experiments

Full-Quad-Full-Triangle-Full-Sphere.skp

Corrugated_Sphere.skp

@Dave-R said in Sketchup and Miniature Modelling STLs:

The alternative is to do what it does manually

Or maybe just use the free Universal Importer, which is perfectly compatible with Sketchup Make 2017 and it also include a robust decimation functionality powered by the MeshLab engine?

Universal Importer | SketchUcation

3D SketchUp Community for Design and Engineering Professionals.

(sketchucation.com)

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

The GOAT

Indeed.

@EricBreuerDesigns said in Toposhaper:

I am having difficulty finding

Use the link provided by Rich and just hit download

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

Love the heat haze!

It's actually pretty simple and nearly physically based.
After quite a lot of overcomplicated experiments, I came up with something really simple and actually pretty effective that renders super-fast and works at every viewing angle with zero postproduction needed.

This is the final version.
I made a smooth lowpoly volume for the wawe and linked it to the main car rig (which is actually animated in order to get physically accurate motion blur and panning effect).

The base material is just "clean air"

• no diffuse/albedo
• no specular reflection
• no normal/bump/displacement whatsoever
• fully refractive
• base IOR = 1

You'd say: "Nice, a useless material which basically does nothing applyed to a useless mesh which is basically invisible".

But then there's the crucial trick.

• I plugged a map in the IOR slot of the material with a multiplier of 3.
  Basically the map acts as a mask telling Vray: "When the pixel is full white display IOR 3 (heavy distortion), when the pixel in the mask is full black, fallback to the base material IOR (which, as we said, is 1 so 0 distortion), if it's some grey interpolate accordingly between the two"
• the map itself is a composite map (blended in overlay mode to keep the dark part and the light part, while applying a bit of contrast)
• the main turbulence effect blended in the composite IOR map is some kinda procedural fractal/turbulence noise (greyscale)
• the second map blended in is another procedural map with some "custom inverted fresnel law". Basically a view-based fall-off driven by a linear curve graph which interpolates between white when camera rays are perpendicular to the suface of the wawe mesh, while gradually fades toward black when camera rays hit the mesh at increasing angle. This actually gives the smooth transition at the edge of the wawe object at any viewing angle (without it, the thing would look as a slab of unreflective frosted glass or something like that)

@Rich-O-Brien said in Ferrari F2004:

Flashback to Schuey giving Barichello the win at Indianapolis

Actually that one was two years before, but yeah, definitely that render was meant as a tribute to that legendary shot... of course you nailed it, as opposed to an architect on the Italian SketchUp community who said, when I originally shared the renderings: "Nice, but you absolutely need to remove that brick material thing which is ugly, out of context, doesn't make sense and completely ruins the shot"