My quick test seemed to work ok. Could you post the dodgy file?

Indeed it is. Ive played around with it for a few mins and its incredibly fast and intuitive. If only i could sculpt id have probably made something half decent by now!

The texturing tools are also very cool. You can basically just paint straight on to the model: its awesome.

SU's hardly an untapped mine of advertising revenue, though.

And i wouldnt be surprised if some enterprising developers got a torrent client working on the platform, because as i understand it it's basically android.

Works fine for me

Jeff, lycium's posts on the indigo forum suggest that your card should work fine with it. Get testing

@tig said:

You shouldn't simply do something because you can: you should do it only after some deliberation.
Seems to me that no one asked 'us', 'Should we create artificial life ?' - they just did it.
OK, perhaps it will be the 'best idea any one ever had' - and I don't really bracket it with 'incest' - BUT we have managed pretty much to screw up the earth's life and ecology we already had, ready-made for us, so I hold out little hope for us doing anything better with this new set...

I highly doubt that humankind has the capacity to sort out the problems we have created for ourself with the current body of knowledge, so we may as well keeping pushing forward (hows that for a weak argument!)

@unknownuser said:

Wouldn't our limited resources have been better directed towards using and resolving what we already had - life/ecology/biology/health/etc/etc rather than something additional that [initially at least] offers us nothing immediately, but which could produce untold new problems, when we are struggling to cope with the myriad problems we already have ?

I disagree. I dont think the pursuit of knowledge is ever a bad thing in itself, and at this time that is all it is. Speculating about the possible problems and/or benefits caused by something that is years away from existence is a waste of time in my opinion, we have nothing to base our opinions on, we are just imagining.

Secondly, why stop pushing the boundaries just because problems that have always plagued humankind continue to do so? We havnet been able to solve these problems so far, and i highly doubt its due to a lack of investment in those areas.

@unknownuser said:

I am not against new ideas or advances in science - leave that to the 'fundamentalists' on all sides... BUT seems to me that this latest idea is akin to the middle-ages experts debating 'how may angels could fit on the head of a pin' whilst civilization/common-sense crumbled around them....

Last time i looked out the window the world was still in pretty good nick, all things considered.

That reminds me of another point: we dont know how fast the ball was travelling. If it was going at mach 2 i wouldn't be very surprised if it wobbled a bit when it hit something stationary...

Some very brief research suggests that different varieties of golf balls exist, specifically you can get ones that are much softer than a regulation ball, so perhaps its one of those.

To the best of my knowledge, although the gif did come from some random site, so impossible to say definitively.

Well dont be surprised if SU wins considering your posting this on a sketchup forum, slightly biased sample...

http://www.indigorenderer.com/node/1012

A damm good excuse to fork out for a new graphics card has arrived.

@tig said:

I'd put 'artificial-life' in the first category - we didn't have it and we didn't need it, but we now have it but don't need it - we'll now have to spend time and effort in sorting it out...

Come on TIG, no one actually knows what'll come out of this, so surely its a little premature to say we dont need it.

I think the good that has come from scientific endeavour far outweighs the bad, though.

In this case it is just a 'clone' of an existing bacteria, so chances of it going a rampage are pretty slim.

With regards to 'needing' to do it, a pretty silly point really. Whats to say they wont go on to engineer a bacteria that produces food stuff from garbage? I agree with pete that its open to abuse, though i dont think thats a good reason to stop research in this area.

With the number of points you have in that file its probably easiest to just connect the points up by hand with the line tool, just make sure you try and make triangles between the points otherwise SU wont necessarily close the faces.