Got a copy the minute I heard it was out. Great work as always, Dave!

To use more standard terms, your default Template determines the initial camera (and other properties) used for a new model.

The second thing you describe is puzzling, though, as a saved file should reload with the same view as when saved.

@dave r said:

But the text portion is very useful if you need a cut list. I also find it useful as a quick check for problem dimensions.

I agree completely on both points. The printed parts list is my go-to to take to the lumber yard when selecting boards. And I embarrassingly often discover parts that were drawn just a bit out of whack when their dimensions come out on the printed cutlist with the dread ~.

On the most recent version, there is a dialog to set up the thicknesses, widths, and lengths of boards you want used as stock for cutting layout. I don't use any of the cutting layout features myself because they don't allow for grain direction, figure matching, or for dealing with flaws in the wood.

This has also been reported on the sketchup.com forum. It seems to depend a lot on the specific hardware, which supports the idea that it is somehow related to an input device driver change in 10.11.4. Other than using a different mouse, I haven't seen a fix as such.

If your model is very large and/or you are drawing something very far from the model origin, you can get effects like that when SketchUp and the OpenGL hardware can't track locations consistently with each other due to computer arithmetic limitations.

As Dave says, SU uses only a single core, so there is no benefit to quad vs duo unless you have enough other things running at the same time to fill all your cores. However, SU will benefit from a faster clock rate or from a faster CPU architecture, so potentially an i7 might be faster than an i5 depending on details - but we're talking about incremental, not for example a factor of 2 or more.

It is entirely permissible and pretty common to devote one file to each class. However, if you do so you will need to put your files into your own subfolder of Plugins, because otherwise SketchUp will try to load all of the individual .rb files as it starts up, which is not what you need. Instead, you should have a master file that loads/requires the others as and when needed. Also, you should look into the SketchUpExtension class, as it provides a natural way to manage your code in SketchUp. And, above all, you should wrap all of your code inside your own personal module to prevent it from clashing with other plugins and extensions.

It is certainly possible, though not simple, to model the hull of a boat using SketchUp.

But I'm a bit unclear about your assignment. In what form have you been "given a floorplan", and what are the characteristics of the space you are supposed to design? As Dave says, the shape of a boat is usually quite complex compared to a house, with few rectangular rooms and few flat or vertical surfaces. By "design", do you mean to plan the layout and materials for the interior furnishings the way an interior designer would do for a house? There are also special considerations that have to be given to materials and design to allow for the damp and sometimes actively wet conditions in a boat.

Do you have background for this? If not, you have a lot to learn about boats before you need to worry about SketchUp!

Does Windows SketchUp support assigning any F keys as shortcuts? It doesn't on Mac (you just get a 'ding' if you try).

Yes, John, I did. Attached below. Read the top of the file for instructions on how to use it (Ruby source is just text, so Preview or any text editor can look at it).

Steve

importprefs.rb

No, thank Trimble for being slow to adapt SketchUp for high-dpi displays of any sort.

@driven, good question. Since against all advice I usually keep my account at admin, I sometimes forget to check. The man page for networksetup says it requires admin privileges in general and root for setting most things. ifconfig also requires admin for most settings, but I believe any user can run it to query values.

On a Mac you can use either of these commands to get the MAC address of the default network interface (you will need to parse the line to extract it):

` ifconfig en0 ether

networksetup -getmacaddress en0`

(in both cases that is a zero not an "oh" in en0)

@dave r said:

It is common to use a cheaper wood for interior parts in furniture. Save the expensive stuff for where it'll show.

Yup, normal practice dating back at least several hundred years maybe thousands!

Nice David! I can't tell from the image, do the backs have any leanback (aka "slouch")? If so, cool. If not, you might consider putting some in, as chairs with perfectly erect backs aren't very comfortable!

On Mac, the nearest is probably system_profiler. It takes a while to run and has only limited options to reduce its large volume of output. Just as TIG suggested for the Windows version, you will no doubt need to invest in some post-processing to extract the specific info you want. Depending on what you need, there might be alternatives.

Joao got the texture to wrap around the block, but abandoned physical realism in the process! There would have to be end grain somewhere.

@cuttingedge said:

i have no ruby exposure or experience, but something tells me that if one sees the need, this might actually be doable... just imagine if you are modelling a car with reference drawing in say front,side, top. how convenient that would be moving one vertex and see them falling in the perfect spot in each particular view.. even with some kind of linking as suggested by pilou..

The SketchUp engine does not support simultaneous multiple views. The Ruby API can't do anything to views that isn't supported by the engine. After all, it is just a programming interface to the engine.

Mac is right, though there are several other approximate formulas that are better than the one he gave. Also, there are power-series that can be run to enough terms to get arbitrarily close. The point here is that even the sum of the lengths of the edges in the oval comes much closer than the strange values that SketchUp sometimes provides.i