Hi folks.

For the style question, I have this answer:

1 - Open the Style Window. Normally the Select tab shall be selected.

2 - Choose the "In model" Styles (the small house).

3 - Click on the Edit tab.

4 - Click on the third icon.

5 - Click on the square to the rigth of "Background".

6 - Check that you have RGB to the right of "Picker", if not, use the pull down list to select RGB.

7 - Slide all three cursors to 0 to get pure black.

8 - Click OK then Update the style.

9 - Hide the axes and you are done.

For the stars, however, you would need to add some small dots or small geometries, using different colors since stars comes in all kind of colors or, better yet, use what was suggested, using a watermark made from a nice sky photos. There are now so many nice photos available on the web.

Good luck with your project. This is one things I already though of modeling, the Rama spaceship, outiside and inside. Using the extremely precise description of A. C. Clarke, it should not be too difficult.

Have you read all the four books of this saga ?

See this :

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=c3239ab7c577d245298d8588f7bc19ff

By the way, since the ship is 54 km long, SU migth have clipping problem with such a large model if you draw it at a 1:1 scale. I would try using a 1:10 scale. But, try it as you whish since you can use the Scale Tool to adjust the size at any stage in the modeling process. You could even use a 1:1000 scale, using meters but pretending that they are kilometers.

Just ideas.

True, the count you get from face.mesh.count_polygons is SU's own internal triangulation. It might not match if you try to export and compare in another 3d application.

But it works as a good complexity comparison between SketchUp models.

Yo, mac1:
Sure wish I had known about these links earlier. Seems a lot of discussion could be answered about this 64 bit question by simply providing the link.
Thanks for sharing, because the info in both links is presented with clarity.

One thing I've learned about the Follow-Me tool is to be very selective of where I start the face on the line to be followed.

If I have a perfect circle or arc to follow, it really does not matter. 99 out of 100, the face is perched on a line segments vertex.

But IF the line depicts a non circular CLOSED curve, it seems to matter where on the line the face is perched. It almost always has to be perpendicular to and ON the line, NOT at a vertex.
If the curve is open, then perch the face at the start of the line; but it must be perpendicular to that start line segment.

Doing that has reduced the anomalous results dramatically.

@philippelemay said:

Anyway, I got this:

Acer Aspire AX3400-E3202
AMD X2 Dual-Core processor 2,8GHz
3GB DD3 RAM
...
Nvidia GeForce 9200 integrated graphics unit

...asking for possible causes on why it's been so laggy. Because I can't accept the fact that it would be insufficient hardware on my part.

a cheap soho system with a shared video solution is surely not the system dedicated to 3D cad modeling (aka number crunching) with OpenGL graphics output... why not asking before buying?

If screen transformations (zooming, rotating, panning) is the lagging issue, you may want improve it by inputing a dedicated mid-range graphics accelerator as e.g. a nVidia GeForce GTS450 or an ATI Radeon HD5770 etc.

hth,
Norbert