@dave r said:

Interesting. I model very small details all the time and find that keeping the camera set to Perspective almost always works just fine for me. I rarely run into the clipping issue and generally don't have the problems others have been describing. I wonder why. I must be doing it wrong.

Could this be due to the relative size of the models we are working on? I am designer/builder so am most often working on a house with outbuildings and a landscape mesh so they are pretty big when I zoom in to work on something where 1/16" matters. I kind of go crazy with the detailing. How large are your models in general Dave?

I work most of the time in perspective but for my plans I have multiple scenes in 2-point. When looking at sections, elevations, etc in 2-point I often find little things I want to tweak to make them look cleaner on the drawings. So yesterday it looked like this: I review a section cut and see something I want to adjust and switch to parallel to make it easier to see/work on. When I do this it zooms me 100' feet or more back from the detail I was looking at then I have to zoom back in. Once fixed I switch back to 2 point and it zooms out again.

Dave, I know you only mentioned you don't have a problem with clipping so much rather than the zoom issue at hand but I have a question for you. If you zoom in to a small detail on one of your models in a 2-point ortho view then switch to parallel view to you get the same behavior of the camera zooming way back? If it's not a huge zoom how big is your model?

@mitcorb said:

What about saving various parallel projection scenes to return to when you need it, and for that matter, non-parallel view scenes?

A decent workaround for some situations but not so great for my workflow unfortunately. I am using many different section cuts, views, locations, layer and entity visibility etc which would make the number of scenes to memorize too unwieldy. It would take me longer to find the right scene tab than to zoom in.

Thanks for the contribution to the brainstorm

I do actually have the change between projection types as a shortcut but unfortunately this doesn't really help as it is the act of switching between projection modes that zooms it out and then I have to zoom back in.

I just put zoom window as a shortcut and that makes it faster than mousing in but still an extra step that gets in the way. Thanks for the thought.

if unfixable or adjustable in the native SU I wonder if it is possible to do something in ruby. I have no idea what ruby can and can't do.

When working on my model I switch between parallel projection and perspective fairly often during some stages of development. What has been driving me crazy is that when I do this the view often zooms way out and I will have to manually zoom back in each time.

It wastes time, annoys me and I really don't see the purpose.

It doesn't seem like this is something that can me fixed/changed but if it is please let me know. If you know the logic for this behavior it might at least help me be less irritated by it. Does this annoy anyone else?

SU pro 2014

Thanks, I will give that one a try as well

@box said:

If you followed the link Alan gave you to the smartdrop thread you'll see it has a link to the download in the Pluginstore, if you follow that it will download a .rbz version of the plugin so you can install it using the install extension tab in preferences.

I did follow the link but my eyes went directly to the .rb download rather than what I now see is a link to the .rbz file. Thanks for the clarification.

I did eventually get the script to run after a few hours. Wont risk that again. I see that SmartDrop is supposed to work for 2014 and would like to give that a try. Where do I install the .rb since there is no longer a plugins folder?

I downloaded it and gave it a go. It has been frozen ever since (about an hour), hoping it will figure it out. It was a pretty big operation. I will post later if it ends up working.

Looks like there are a few plugins that have been created which drop components down onto a uneven plane. I can't seem to find any that have been updated to 2014 specs, anyone know one that is compatible?

I am looking to drop rocks and trees onto a ground contour.

running win 7 and 2014 pro

thanks for any help you can provide.

I haven't tested out the performance yet but I am very pleased with Trimble's list of improvements. LO has become an important part of my workflow and I have been flirting with bringing BIM into my scope of work. Ruby 2.0 hopefully will keep the amazing plugin developers happy. The fact that they are looking to boost performance of the programs (especially LO) is great. Keep up the good work Trimble.

Yup I pretty much have been using your method with an extra step (or different step anyway) to try and get the image as close to real life as possible which is what you describe above.

They are all unique so I have to evaluate each one. I then scale the object to its smallest repeating size, name it, and make it a unique texture. Rotate it 90 and save another unique texture. I know you think this is a waste of time but rotating wood grain is something that drives me crazy for some reason. I would rather do it once and then never have to do it again (almost). Your process saved me from having to save each texture individually which is great. Thanks again for taking the time to help me out.

Thanks Dave for sharing your process. My needs are a little different since I am working with materials right now that deal with hundreds of square feet (tile, flooring, T&G, fencing, decking, etc) so I really need something that will tile reasonably well. I am also using images where I didn't take the photo so I don't know the dimension of the incoming image so I think I am still bound to try to match an approximate scale to the image.

That being said I have never seen or used the "create collection" button. That is a definite time saver. Thanks so much!!

I would love to know if you have a more streamlined process because this is taking a lot longer than it should (in my opinion).

What is taking the most time is I am scaling each image so they are close to what they should be in reality. For instance on a texture for T&G planks I am scaling the image so that the image of each board is 5.5". I am also making a unique texture for both vertical and horizontal orientations. I am trying to avoid having to scale the texture each time I use it in the future. Seems like there are a lot of steps to make this happen in my flow. This is of course a tangent frustration not related to the naming but perhaps your workflow might eliminate a step or two if you were willing to share.

Looks like I found it. I was neglecting to enter a name in the material window when creating the new material. I was assuming that the file name would be displayed but it seems I missed the step of naming it inside the SU material browser.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on this one.

I am creating a bunch of new materials by importing the jpeg then saving as skm. Sketchup isn't letting me save directly into the material folder of the program so I am saving to desktop then moving. Side question: Is this the only way to do this?

My main question is: when I copy the materials into the appropriate SU materials folder it all looks fine. Inside the folder the names appear as I have named them originally. When I close and open SU and go to these new materials I can see them in the material window but their names appear as generic names such as Material 23 instead of "AC Plywood" for instance. I tried AC_Plywood with same result.

Materials I did in previous versions of SU display correctly. What am I doing wrong.

Thanks for any help you can provide. Hopefully I explained this precisely enough.

This site has some really great tillable textures. A free account gets you 15mb of textures and the lowest resolution textures look great in SU (for my purposes anyway)

http://cgtextures.com/index.php

check them out, very cool.

So I am having a problem that seems to not be related to magnetic declination but decided to post in this thread since it seems like there are many here that have looked at this particular tool.

I have pro 2013 and have successfully loaded the toolbar and it seems to work though I have not tried all of the functionality yet. I do not want to change the default settings untill I understand something, hopefully developers are watching this thread.

I have imported a scene from google maps and with it the geolocation of the project (prior to installing the north angle toolbar). On google maps north is always straight up. When I use the north arrow to display the north angle it is around 27 deg off. This could not be the magnetic declination difference since it is only 8.8deg for this area. How does the default north arrow calculate the default position if not from the geolocation? I have moved the default axis many times while modeling, could this have caused the confusion? Is there a way to get the north arrow to snap back to the geolocation?

see attached

Side note, I checked out your site. Amazing work, I love the concept and design of the little tent buildings. Very well done.

you are using the gaming glove with SU? It looks cool, love the idea of cyborg modeling tech. I will look at it a little more closely