I look at online video tutorial time to time. When I miss a step, I just pause it, rewind a little, and replay it until I get it.

This may not be the answer, but surface do get cut up when photo match photo is projected to surface and part of photo image is missing. Here is quick image I made with cut mark at the edge of photo:

Technically sail is an airfoil. So, one of the way to model it is to lay down base airfoil section first. Copy it number of times along the height of the sail. Scale down each section and connect it all. Well, if you want to model it to real shape, sail needs to twist as it go up too; the unsupported side of sail tends to get pushed away with wind load. It all works out as airfoil, because wind aloft is stronger than at the boom. If you are racer, this airfoil needs to be in prefect form to get the maximum power out of wind.

Nice sketch and modeling.

White? What white? Well it all depends. If you paint your background black, your gray will turn white! It’s magic! Read some more on Adleson’s Checker Shadow Illusion.

Other way to do it is to make the pile as a single object. Here is my quick illustration:

I just grabbed woodpile picture and bark picture from the web and went from there.

Sorry Voder, can’t open your file. I am still on SU6. I tried to down load SU7 several times without success. I am surprised that Google doesn’t have functioning server???

Any way here is method two; a pin with larger diameter added where slot is cut. To make the pin and slot cutter I must used Follow me tool. At the end I just smoothed the edges.

Of course this level of detail is a over kill if you are just working on assembly.

Normally if you make a box 5 inch by 5 inch and try to print it out at full size on A size paper, SU will cut it up in to 6 sheets!

I finally found a workaround for this problem.

It appears that the drawing you are trying to print out for A size paper is too small for SU to handle. After all SU was designed to print out the 3D geometry of a size of a skyscraper on to A size paper. When the geometry you are asking to handle gets smaller than A size paper SU starts to do some weird things. This problem is encountered with number of other 3D software as well.

So the answer is simple. After drawing is done just scale it up by 10. And print it at 1 / 10 scale. You get full size printout. It works! By the way SU can handle geometry up to 9.3 inches by 6.5 inches per A size paper. If your geometry is larger than that, cut it up yourself and print it on multiple sheets. That way you have full control over the output.

until Bryce looked to be the right size

Interesting method. When I took the photo, I was not paying attention to number of pedestrians in the image. But they are there. It can be used to scale. I should intentionally include them from now on, in at least few of the building shots.

The PhotoMatch looks better. My first try was done on “corrected” image where lens distortion was removed and. And, that added different type of distortion. I think. The blue axis misalignment was quite bad. It is still not right on still. I think PM should have option to have third vanishing point up in the sky for case like this. By the way how did you get 165’ without knowing the base dimension?

Ya, it works. Thanks.

I faked truss using just line and found I can’t color it! Also no shadow projects! Is there a way to over come this?

Ya I did watch BaseCamp video. Good stuff. My first PhotoMatch (PM) worked fine. I was impressed by the fact that PM gave me correct height of the building. I took different shot to compare and it was right on! Up to then I was just editing the photo to take the distortion out. But than taking out distortion caused image to distort you know. So deriving height from photo was not accurate. PM can give you better number.

Here is the photo that is giving me problem. I took the photo. The image is not edited or crapped. But I reduced image size to give me the height of 1024 pix. As I understand it any higher resolution will not display in SU, right?

I was trying to use Photo Match on tall building. The photo is framed vertically. Thus there are lots of vertical line information but not as many horizontals. Horizontal lines are all short and they are obscured on one face of the building. There is very little cue on horizon; trees and road around it have slope. Anyway, after photo matching it nothing came out right; horizon came out tilted, and central vertical axis didn’t line up with the vertical line of building, and both far edge of the vertical line didn’t came out parallel with building line. All, way off.

I assume tilted horizon means that photo was taken tilted. So with photo match, as you create surfaces, the display is just tilted right, and the 3D elements are really sitting correctly?

When vertical wall line don’t line up with SU line, do you just play with location of horizontal until it looks right? I did that in this case, but the setup line came out not quite lined up with the building element.

Here is quick build from your image file:

As James explained, just trace and pull basically. But first you need to import your file in to SketchUp as an “image.” Place the corner at origin and stretch it out on ground plane. Using measuring tool, measure one of the building dimension. Than enter correct size. SU will ask you whether you want to resize it. Press yes. Now when you trace and pull, the height, the height number will relate with the base image.

Nice work.

As for visual problem, your model shadow on the ground is too light. And the color on the building is simply too bright. So visually it is popping out off the ground. Color blending is needed. If you look at Google Earth, photo image of roof alone contains at least dozen colors! Blending takes some work.

You can change the line weight to thinner setting in style.
First, select “in model” icon to display current style.
Second, select “Mix” tab and under Select pick Straight Lines from the list.
Third, pick the lightest line drawing with eyedropper, which shows up when you hover the curser over it. It shows “Straight Line 0.1 pix.”
Forth, after selecting, move the eyedropper up to Edge Settings box and select it. You now should have 0.1 pix line on the edges.

Nice work. The render on bottle is almost there. If you can tweak the reflectivity, the bottle will look better I think.

Is this what you are looking for;
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=12674

As SU model becomes more and more complex, you need to use Components and Groups. This will isolate those models. If they get in your way, just “hide” them or “Lock” them. Locking is good because selection tool no longer snap to it. After making all those Groups and Components, use Window > Outliner to control there state.