Mateo, that is a somewhat more complex style. Yes, very pleasing.
Tom, I guess I mean that the style is sort of "primitif". Capturing the essence of child-like simplicity of style and colour, happy, uncomplicated, gay ( in it's original meaning) etc etc.

Roger I would be most interested in seeing an example of your work that you friend finds distrubing. I thin I would like "disturbting"
Please post?

No Mateo, only one party needs to have the contract and then you "invite" people to the meeting. It doesn't matter if it is the same people invited each time.
If one party has the contract, they need to do the inviting but they do not need to "run" the meeing. The host passes control over to an ivited guest and they can run the meeting. You can pass control back and forth to different people during the session.
I won't go into too much pricing detail but I did get some really special pricing, as well as the agreement to add extra people above 15 for $15 per person per time plus they waived the $399 set up fee if I signed up before the end of the year.

Mateo, for your business needs, this may not be a bad thing at all.

Tom the first of the images look more "human". The second is more graphical.

Tom,....Tom... I totally LOVE this image. It is uttery charming and eye catching and adorable.

Tina, before there were movies and television and there was only the "artist" we were all accustomed to viewing scenes from a person's eye height. We are still taught in Art school to do perspectives from and eye height of 5'6", the height of the eyes of a 6' man.

However, our culture is now accustomed to all the weird angles we are able to see from the vantage point of a crane/boom we are much more adaptable to seeing things from different angles.

It all depends on which features you will want to reveal and focus on and what "feel" or "mood" you want to illicit.
Take in large areas from just above a tree and view the neighbourhood while still having a foreground frame of reference ( the tree top) to add depth.

View a mansion from below eye level to add to it's apparent grandeur. Pretend you are making a movie and want to make a "suggestion" to the viewer by the clever use of the angle of view. I know you are up to it. You are a great talent.

I think it is 60 degrees (not 65) that is the outside limit before you get distortion; which also happens to coincide with a person's cone of vision where the rest is all peripheral and hazy.

We can now add one more feature that does not come with the Free version: The Style Builder.

Reporting in on results.
I was not able to get around to testing with the kind people who offered to help me out but I had the Webex people give me a demo and here is what I found out that is NOT very clear on their site:
There are one time usage fees but the voice part is then very expensive
There is $50 monthly fee to use webex but you commit to a 12 MONTH contract upfront.
The $50 fee is ONLY good for a simple version which does not allow for file sharing within applications so that you can help each other out NOR does that include MAC support
The fee for the service to allow file sharing is actually $150 per monthbut you commit to a 12 MONTH contract upfront .
At this fee rate you are covered for up to 15 participants per session.
If you want voice support, the conference calling telephone feature is quite expensive. You can get an integrated VOIP package for about 450 man hours of VOIP per month for about $30, paid monthly with an annual commitment. IF you want to save, even the chat feature is extra.
There is a $399 set up fee

Chrstmas is a good time to commit to a package because they are anxious to meet annual sales targets and are inclined to bargain some with you.

QUALITY
All depends on available bandwidth and usage at the time the you are demonstrating. For just demo purposes the speed isn't bad at all. Taking control of a "students" computer is slower and can potentially be bad. Need to close all bandwidth using applications on your desktop to speed things up. Not a deal breaker as it was with another competitor procuct I looked at.

I generally teach from the back of the class so that I can see how people are progressing on their computers to guage when I am able to move forward.
I will not have any visual cues when I teach in this format. However if students have a webcam, I am able to see their faces in little minimized icons . hell, I could ask them to point their web cams at the computer. Hmm. I wonder.

Any way the students can either have 2 monitors and place my demo on the one and their work applicaton on another, OR with one monitor they can shape the demo window to occupy half the screen and the work window the other half. the demonstrator would work with a full screen of just the application (but then he couldn't see the little icons of the people, hmm. Don't know)

Anyway, that is what I've got. There are other options, such as virtual classrooms where they load the software on to their workstations so the students don't need a license for the software being taught and you can have more than 15 students but of course that is a more expensive option.

Note: no need to crop & stretch photos outside of SketchUp. You an use the tool we used before there was Photo Match: Texture Tweaker to stretch and pull the perspective right out of a photo. In fact you can use Texture tweaker together with Photo match to correct some distortions after your have photo matched.
It is a very simple Photo Match to use only one PHoto. If you look at the Photo match options after you have completed the first one, you will see that you have the opportunity to continue the Photo match with another photo from the other side of the buildin. You can continue on in this fashion.

In the SketchUp Book by Bonnie Roskes, she completes a very complex Photomatch of a hospital with many wings and with more than one Photo. It is pretty impressive.

My kids and I are going on a little 5 day cruise at Christmas time. I thought I'd use some of the shipboard and touring time to draw and paint a bit again. I think I may have forgotten how.
At any rate we are meeting a friend on the boat who is also a wannabe-artist and so I've put together a 2 identical little drawing kits including small sketchbooks, a collection of thin markers and a beautiful set of 24 aquarelle pencil crayons and some brushes.

I thought I'd add a little cartoon into the package for some inspiration and I remembered something that gave me a chuckl in another life: first year university Humanities course ( How to "KNOW") This is from the book "Art and Illusion" by Gombrich. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Eric I've posted a good selection of them for you on Kelly's site.

Download Here
This one is quite nice but you might need to adjust the hue a bit.

I don't think so. Just boring turos teszta. Which is still delicious. All Hungarian food is unbelievable. Not great for the arteries though.

Jo etvagyat!

Rolled in fried bread crumbs and yes with salt. No sour cream. I personally add black pepper.

yes yes. that!

the most famous cafe in Budapest, very old and still there, is the Zserbo. I made a point of seeing it when I was backpacking through Europe too many years ago to count.

Okay, how about this, if you like szilva gombocs then you must of course like the dish that it accompanies: krumplis nudli. Long ago I wanted to surprise my parents and make all of that for dinner. My mother had a real Hungarian cookbook given to her and I searched in vain for the recipe. In fact it occured to me that there was not a single recipe for potatoes(krumpli) in the entire cookbook.

My mother informed me of just what a peasant I am, since everyone knows that the elegant name for potatoes is bourgonya

Hungary is such a small country, but there seem to be so many expatriots. What that fabulous cabinet needs, Gidon, is some Zserbo.

I imagine that should work. Can't think of any reason why not.

Great video, but there is a crucial piece of information missing. You cannot grab any photo from the internet and expect Photo Match to work properly. It will not work on a photo that has been cropped and you have no clue whether the photo that you have grabbed from the web has been cropped. You must work with original photos with the viewer standing in the the center of the photo horizontally.

Next, photo match works best when there is a corner of the structure toward the viewer at a 45 degree angle. Other angles may work but 45 degrees is best. For an interior, you would want the back cornter to be at a 45 degree angle.

Aidan also very quickly mentioned the grid style.Make sure that you are using a grid style that matches your photo. If you are doing an aerial view, for instnace, you want a grid style that is the top down one and not the defualt architectural one. Just make sure that the photo isn't cropped or it won't work.

At one point I heard that the export resolution on raster files had a lower limit than in the Pro version. Is that true/still true?

It's different in SketchUp 6, and quite irritating too.
Make sure you place the face-me component at the angle of view that you want.
In the component browser, click on the "in model" little house icon. Then click on the edit tab. The edit properties will be greyed out. Click on the picture/icon of the face-me component and the edit properties will now no longer be greye out. UNTICK the checkbox next to "always face camera" That will change the property of the one in the model.
Here's the irritating part. Another copy of the component will want to follow your cursor into the model. You will need to hit escape to get rid of it.
Why they took it out of the entity info or the component preferences I will never know.

BTW the edit changes the preferences of the component in the "in-model" window of the component browser so subsequent iterations will also have the face-me behaviour turned off.