I thought I'd give an update here on this build, as well as a 2nd computer I put together pretty quickly after the first:

Both have:

i7-3930K CPU
ASUS p9x79 motherboard
16Gb ram
SSD system drive (240 and 256 Gb versions) and HDD for data storage

The main difference between the two computers is the graphics card. First one has GTX680, my 2nd one has GTX670 (both EVGA reference). For my 2nd computer I was perilously close to buying a Quadro card, just to satisfy my curiosity... in the end I went with the 670 for the 2nd one because it is only slightly lagging behind the 680 in performance, but runs cooler, less wattage and was about $200 cheaper. I posted some performance figures in a speed test thread on this forum. I have a bias for nvidea cards, but I understand that the AMD 7970 card is the man if you want GPU computational power (the 680 apparently is a poor performer in this regard... if you google it you'll find some articles). Having said that, I haven't been able to stall sketchup with any model I've previously put together and I get smooth orbiting, etc. at all times. I stayed away from the GTX580 because it is pretty power hungry, but otherwise I understand it is pretty good performance for money.

The 6 core i7-3930 chip is only used fractionally with sketchup (1 core), so it is wasted if that is all you're doing. I tend to run things in the background a lot, so that's how I justified the cost, and I don't regret it.

The reason I went with the p9x79 board is that it has 8 ram slots, so I filled 4 and have a 2nd set free for future upgrade. Honestly, I think 16Gb is wasted, so 24 is not likely to provide value for money. I used autocad, sketchup, photoshop, office, etc. often all at once and have never had any ram issues.

I went for ASUS VE278Q 27in Widescreen LED Monitors - good price and no complaints at all.

Problems: well these were my first 2 builds ever, and I was patting myself on the back thinking everything was going perfectly, but in the end I did have some hiccups...

• the BIOS version that came with the asus p9x79 motherboards were considerably out of date. I had some hard lockups that I was getting frustrated with, which instantly went away when I upgraded the bios (quick and simple !). I spend quite a bit of time looking at my drivers, to see what was out of date, before I realised it was the bios that was the problem.
• my first computer was built in a corsair 550D case. It was fractionally too large for the space I have in a desk recess at my office (the CD tray couldn't open fully), that computer is my home office version now. My second build was based on the corsair 300R case which is a bit smaller.

Hope this helps someone

Cheers

• Mick

Probably the simplest would be to drag the hard top edge towards the right and possibly down a bit to lessen the angle. Then "soften" this edge. Sketchup will retain the links between this edge and the other faces when you move it, so you will get a reasonable transition. A better way is if the landform is a sandbox surface that you could 'smoove'to get a nice rounded transition. Cheers - Mick

GPU is reference GTX680

Made negligible difference whether shadows were on or off, or whether window was full screen (1920x1080) or partial. Range was 60.1 (first run, full screen no shadows) to 64.5 (middle run, shadows off, full screen).

Cheers

• Mick

@sdmitch said:

Unfortunately Stepping Stones doesn't work very well around "sharp" corners.

Sam, I wasn't aware of your plugin. It seemed to work beautifully for this, but I needed to orientate either "left" or "right" so that the maximum board width could be constrained to "width". So this means you still have to break the path into sections so there is no inflexion in the curve, but this is way quicker than my method above. Also noticed that the vertex spacing can affect things (say when welding a number of curves together) - I guess this is related to your "sharp corners" issue you mentioned, so using something like Fredo's bezierspline tools (to get a smooth polyline and equal segments) first, and then your stepping stones plugin, had a very pleasing result.

Cheers

• Mick

Sven,

There's a couple of plugins that will spread components along a curve. One is component stringer but I can't remember the name of the other one. I'm not aware of anything that will do the tapers automatically though. I haven't tried this out, but my inclination would be to use component stringer to distribute the gaps rather than the boards:

1. draw the centreline for the boardwalk
2. offset the line both ways by 300mm
3. join the ends up to get your boardwalk surface,
4. draw a 25mm gap "component", make sure the lines overlap your boardwalk surface.
5. then working in sections, so that you are always working on a convex outer margin:
   • string your gap component out along the outside edge of the convex radius at required centres.
   • the "gaps"should rotate with the outside radius
6. finally explode everything erase the gaps, and push pull all your boards to the required depth

Like I said, I haven't tried it, so might needs to some experimentation.

[edit] I tried it.... the other plug in is called pathcopy.rb, I did as described above, it worked fine except the curve I used had too few vertices, so the angle that the gaps were rotated to were a bit off. So I did another one with a tighter curve and more vertices, which gave a reasonable result.

Regards

• Mick
  

@steved said:

Thanks Mick, just a tip I used to use autocad but I now use BRICSCAD if you have not heard of it it is just as good as AUTOCAD by Autode$k. But costs less than the annual upgrade from Autode$k about $400.00 It is just as good, to the degree That if you send a file to an Autocad user it shows as an Autocad file in native DWG, with zero learning curve. The icons are the same, it is also easier on RAM

Oh and if you have a problem they will fix it within the day unlike autocad who will ignore you once you have cashed out.

Good to know

@steved said:

Hi all, I am thinking of upgrading to sketchup pro. I use sketchup on a daily basis for landscape architectural stuff. Thinking of upgrading and want to hear from others who have upgraded. Presentation is not an issue as I export into AUTOCAD for that, I am mainly interested in easier/better modeling such as I am aware of the boolean function, Are there any other useful functions like that? Can someone please explain there experiences about the advantages of switching to pro?

Thanks Guys

I would've thought the native import/export of dwg etc would've been attractive. But really apart from the solid tools, there's not a whole lot of difference if you're not going to use Layout. I bought the pro version for the solid tools and CAD integration and also somewhat because I thought it was great tool and was happy to pay the modest amount (compared to the $6K I handed over for Autocad). With a few plug-ins I don't think there is anything you can do with pro that you couldn't achieve with SU Free. So if you're on a tight budget, you're probably better spending some money supporting some of the great plugin authors !

Cheers

• Mick

Well... put the computer together today. One thing surprised me... it worked first time ! (it was my first build )
Not surprisingly it's pretty fast. Probably the main thing to report is that the gtx680 card seems to work very nicely, no glitches, very smooth orbiting, etc. this was the only area that I was questioning myself.
I threw all my biggest models at it and I couldn't fault it, so not much more to report from the sketchup side I think.
Haven't done any renders though... maybe in a few days.
Cheers

• Mick

@ely862me said:

Pff !!! Guys ,you are definitely running some machines over there , and I am struggling with my dual core 2.8 ghz , 2gb ram ,160 gb hdd , and 1 gb nvidia gt 8600 .

Your recent machines look like 22 century for me , lol !!

If you don't mind,guys, what are your recently configuration, and what are you doing with them? I might buy some parts(or the entire) from you , if you are not going to use them further of course !
Cheers !

And keep it under the radar speed will you !

I think that is one of the great advantages of sketchup in that it will work reasonably well with low spec machines.
I have a number of machines as part of my business (which although only 2 or 3 years old, are all definitely "old"), but I'm not looking to sell any. thanks for the interest.

Hi utiler, I saw your other post... good to see the new office computer goes well.
I got word today that my parts (including a hard to get gtx680) is on its way, so hopefully I'll build it over the weekend

@solo said:

How much?

Great machine.

I'd have gotten at least 2tb HD, and two 27" monitors (Asus is good choice)

Yeah thanks. The cost is $3,200 Australian, including other stuff not listed (Corsair 850AX PSU, 550D case and other bits and pieces). We seem to pay about 20% more than the US for just about everything over here. It's still way cheaper than what I could get through Dell, etc.

As I mentioned, I'll probably get 2 of those monitors, but wanted to try out 1 first for a while to make sure I liked it. Monitors are a pretty personal thing, it's either you love them or hate them but I find I need a bit of time to decide. I'd never used one before, but Asus seems to get pretty good monitor reviews, so I went with it without seeing one in the flesh.

My main file storage is at my work office, so the HDD for this computer is more for live/recent projects. I agree though 2TB is pretty easy to fill these days. I guess my case has got enough space to add another drive if needed.

Cheers

• Mick

Hi Folks, well... after much deliberating and not a small amount of indecision regarding video cards, I finally ordered the bits for my new desktop.

Intel i7-3930 CPU
Asus P9X79 Motherboard
EVGA GTX680 GPU
Intel 520 240Gb SSD
Seagate 7200 1TB HDD
G.Skill 16Gb DDR3-1866 RAM
Win7 Pro 64
Asus 27" VE278Q Monitor (planning to get a 2nd one if this is OK)

In a moment of madness I did consider getting a Quadro 2000 graphics card as well, so I could test the 2 cards side by side definitively, but then sanity (and my bank account) prevailed, and I went for the consumer card.

The parts will be a week or so away yet, but will post a review when tested.

Cheers

• Mick

Hey Utiler, yep aussie and proud of it

Any advice from your tech gurus?

I can't believe the amount of on-going debate all over the internet regarding Quadros and GTX's, even for apparently quadro optimised software.

Cheers

• Mick

Gilles thanks for the tip.

TIG thanks for yet another great plug-in - it worked exactly as advertised.

In my situation it works as a great cleanup tool. If the smooving is done with appropriate care to get it approximately right, when Drop Vertices is applied, the smooth curves created by smoove aren't disrupted to0 much and it comes out nice.

thankyou

• Mick
  

@gaieus said:

You cannot. With Artisan however, you have the option to "lock" certain edges with the crease tool and then use the sculpt brush (similar to the smoove tool in this case) and keep those edges safe.

Hi Gaieus, I tried out the demo of it and that does it exactly... and there's some nice stuff in Artisan, so I think I'll buy it as I think I now NEED quite a few those features. thanks for the tip.

Back to the topic though - I'm surprised an edge can't be locked in native sketchup though? or that there isn't a simple little plugin floating around... maybe it's not so simple?

Cheers

• Mick

@architectfkh said:

the unsolved problem is:

Does the professionals do the same? do they every time which make a little change in the 3d go back to cad file amend it???

Autocad has no way of knowing what you edited in sketchup.

If you prefer to draw 2D in autocad, then you can do that, then export to sketchup, generate your 3D model, and then export it from sketchup back into autocad. You need to experiment with this a bit to see how layers, etc. are translated between the two programs, but it does work. I think there's some plugins to allow the import/export of DWG with the free version of sketchup, but if these aren't available then you need Sketchup Pro, which also comes with Layout.

Layout will allow you to display your model in a variety of paperspace views and add annotation such as dimensions, etc. There's a number of youtube videos on Layout that are worth watching. As you're probably aware, sketchup can be a very powerful tool, and layout provides just enough tools to give a reasonable paper output. Sketchup can be very precise as well, so there's no reason you can't do all the drawing in sketchup.

Good luck with it

• Mick

The picture says it all really - how can I stop the edges of this sandpit from moving if I smoove to close to them?

Thanks

• Mick

@pbacot said:

You can do this. Before pasting in the closed shape to the grid, soften the edges in the grid by selecting all of them and clicking soften coplanar in the smooth/soften window. After you paste in the shape, you'll be able to select the outside and erase it.

Ahhh.. yes of course, I have seen that before - my brain just didn't want to recognise the solution.

@pbacot said:

I don't know that you can lock the outside edges in this process. I guess you just have to avoid them. Anyone?...

Maybe... and probably not too hard to do but it would be good to know if there is a technique to lock the shoreline in place.

Thanks

• Mick

I'm sure the topic doesn't make much sense so I'll try and explain by way of example..

I'm making a pond shape and this is what I was planning:
Start with a flat sandbox grid (20x20m) 0.1m grids.
Draw a complex shoreline on top (outside the group) using the freehand tool.
Copy and paste in place the shoreline into the grid, so it is part of the mesh.

Now... I want to select everything in the mesh that is outside of the shoreline object and delete it, and then lock the outside edges of the mesh (i.e. the shoreline) so that the x,y,z position of those vertices doesn't change. Then I can use smoove without fear of mucking up the shoreline elevation.

Any pointers?

thanks

• Mick

@utiler said:

Thanks for that, Mick. I'll ask my tech guys whats hot in cards at the moment....

I'd be interested to hear what they say. From what I can work out the new gtx680 is the pick of them (less wattage, more triangles per sec), but I had a look online and there seems to be a lot of "out of stock" here in Oz, so not that confident of grabbing a cheap one any time soon.

Just to keep the door open on this topic.... I have yet to find anyone who actually has used both the quadro2000 and gtx580 and can offer any first hand comments.

Cheers

• Mick