I seem to remember seeing a plugin that would allow a texture to be flowed along a curving pipe etc. but I cannot seem to find it. Any suggestions please?

What I mean is that the 3D text is not single lines but double lines, filled or not, extruded or not.

All I am doing is creating a typical floor plan layout of our building (apartment block) to include in a fire evacuation plan I am creating. So it is just a one-off. The page with the diagram on it will be A4 with the drawing probably occupying about half of the page.

The reason I was thinking of going via PNG was because I was intending to type the room names (Lounge, Kitchen etc) in Photoshop or similar. I find Sketchup's text processing to be annoying. The normal text cannot be "glued" in place. It keeps changing position to face the camera and changes size relative to the model as you zoom. 3D text is no good because it gives a double outline.

I have drawn some house plans in SU and am trying to export them to a PNG file that I can incorporate into a PDF document. The problem is SU exports exactly what it sees on the screen. Even though it is a simple line drawing, many of the lines are thickened to several pixels wide and reduced to a light grey colour instead of being black, no matter what zoom level I use. It does not matter whether I use perspective or parallel projection.

Is there any plugin that allows a line drawing to be exported as exactly that please? ie. so that all of the lines are single-pixel wide and black (with anti-aliasing on the curves)?

The other problem I have is aligning the view. Because at some stage I have obviously changed the axes, when I select a surface and right click and choose Align View, it goes to an overhead view but rotates the image to a 45 degree angle.

What I would like is something that would export the image so it is aligned with the current axes.

I realise that I can copy and paste the model into a new model to fix the axes problem, but that is a pain, given that I will usually have started from a Get more Imagery and aligned the drawing to the imagery. In that case it will always be skewed with respect to the original axes.

Worked that time thanks. I tried it for over an hour last night with the same error. Maybe they were doing maintenance.

Just tried to download fluidimporter. Web page comes back with an error Internal Server Error.

For those of you who haven't tried it, I suggest you have a look at Autocad 123D Catch from http://www.123dapp.com/ It builds a 3D model from a series of photos of an object.

You upload the photos to their web site, it builds the model, which you can then download and save in various formats, including OBJ.

If you install Fluidimporter OBJ importer for Sketchup you can then import the model to Sketchup. The result is mind-blowing.

Fluidimporter is available here: http://www.fluidray.com/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=10

One word of warning. The supplied example that comes with 123D Catch, namely photos of a statue of Buddha, does not work properly. Various errors occur when trying to upload and process the photos. Here is what I had to do to get it to work:

• Rename all the photos to remove the leading underscore
• Open all the photos in 123D Catch
• Click on Organise Images
• Delete all the individual photos and small groups, leaving just the two big groups of photos
• Compute Photo Scene
• Save as OBJ
• Download and install Fluidimporter
• Start Sketchup
• File/Import (Files of type OBJ) - select saved file
• Voila!

The end result Sketchup file is available from http://www.3dgooglemodels.com.au/buddha.skp

Note that it is 13.5Mb in size, due to the large poly count. I just used the default mesh size, which can be changed in 123D Catch. The only other thing I did was open and re-save the texture file, which shrunk it from 4.5Mb to about 800k.

I also didn't pay too much attention to the size units. Once imported it showed as 20m tall so I resized it in SU to be 20cm tall, but that can be done during the Fluidimporter import I believe.

I imagine that the plugin would determine the normal to the projected texture, from which one could construct the plane.

Would it allow the original plane to be determined and recreated?

When I project a texture onto a curved surface I always retain the original plane that I used to project from, either on a hidden layer or in a separate file, to allow for future manipulation if needed.

If I lose the original plane, is there any plugin that will allow the calculation of the position of the plane, such that I can re-create it so as to be able to adjust the texture slightly?

If not is it feasible to write such a plugin? The necessary information must exist somewhere since if you re-project the texture onto a new surface that is parallel with the original plane, the "Texture/Position" option is not greyed out, whereas it is greyed out if you project it onto any other surface and try to reposition the texture.

Can AnimatedUpdate be used to move a MultiGeometry construct that contains multiple individual dae models? I can't seem to get it to work. It is far too tedious to try to constantly recalculate the positions of the individual components.

I did find that I could overcome it by just getting bigger and bigger with the angles. ie. specifying 352 degrees say, then 380 degrees, then 420 degrees etc. It seems to work.

But I actually used a suggestion Aerilius made, which was to get to 359, then do a change to 0 with a duration of 0 so it spun anticlockwise infinitely fast, then carried on with 20 degrees, 80 degrees etc. That also works.

But it is all a fudge. Surely there is some way of forcing the rotation to the desired direction.

See AnimatedUpdate, Change and Update at
http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlreference.html

(If you can figure it out from there good luck!)

I have an animation driven by AnimatedUpdate. If the model has a heading of 358 degrees and I do an animatedupdate to change the heading to 2 degrees, the model spins round anticlockwise by 356 degrees instead of rotating clockwise by 4 degrees. How do I change that behaviour please?

It does not work properly, or else I am doing something wrong.

It does not preserve the orientation of the textures, especially on horizontal surfaces. They are not mirrored to the back face. They are merely painted with random orientation. Often they repeat numerous times.

Both those suggestions were just what I was looking for. Thanks a lot for that.

The graphics card in my (Vista) laptop recently died. I have purchased a new (Windows 7) laptop and installed the old hard drive in the new PC as a second drive. Everything is intact, including the old registry, which I can still access by loading as a hive in Regedit.

I reinstalled Sketchup 8 and copied the Plugins folder and templates over, but I am clearly missing a lot of stuff. For example I had installed the plugin that allows you to specify exactly what toolbars you want etc. (can't remember its name) but the toolbars have reverted to the standard toolbars.

Where exactly (files or registry?) are the various settings for Sketchup stored, so that I can copy them over rather than trying to recreate everything again please?

@roger said:

Photo was laid out and divided by 8. Every other panel raised and separated from the others. Make unique was applied to each.....

Have you looked closely at a texture after doing a Make Unique? Firstly it enlarges the texture and truncates around 4-5 pixels on the right hand edge. Secondly it badly degrades the image quality. I cannot see how it could possibly work, unless you are using a different version of SU from me.

I have attached a screen shot to show the problem. I drew a square around a letter on a model and then did a Make Unique on the square. The first image is before the make unique. The second is after. You can clearly see the reduction in quality and also the enlarging and shifting of the pixels.

Hmmm. I think all of this is more than I need for this particular application. Certainly useful for other things.

In this case once I unfold the cylinder I don't need any fancy texturing. I can just do a plain old SU import texture for the 4 textures and and apply them directly to the faces concerned without any projection. Once I fold the cylinder back up again the textures stay where they are.

Thanks for all the suggestions though.

The only thing that is missing is the reverse of Flattery to fold the flattened object back up again. Given that it has indexed the edges it should be feasible. Maybe it also needs to index the angles between the edges before unfolding.

Do you have a link for the video please? I cannot find it in the UVProjection topic or in the videos page at http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=40041&p=356804#p356804