MuseumMaker, i would love to see some of your projects. do you have a website? or maybe you could post some.

Skinning is making a mesh sort of pliable, like skin. It involves taking the skin and matching the vertices to bones and giving them weight. So each and every vertex of the skin mesh is associated with a bone object. And even associated certain percents to different bones. So that way when you animate the bones of the model, the skin knows how to follow and bend and shrink and stretch, and still look like the original shape. SU can't make a true skin. The best you could probably do is make the geometry and export that to a separate program that could then turn it into a skin. So at least you could model it in SU. Chris

Dont worry I worked it out myself, thank you so much for your help, this will make my model/render so much better!

Always good to have a student aboard as a moderator! Don't ever graduate, Remus! And welcome, Mike!

Ah, ok. Thank you M. Thomthom!

im a london uni student so wont have a .edu email address ... and from the resellers i cant find a version 7 on student license yet ... does anyone have an idea when this would happen ?

Yeah lol. It's the summer holidays! I've got 6 weeks off school.

@starwarsknower said: I know I'm asking for alot of help here, but one more thing, how do you customize shinyness and translucency and stuff using the material editor, i can change the colour and thats about it. I suggest that you download and read the Kerkythea Material Editor Guide... Although it was made for KT2007, basics remain identical in KT2008... I will also suggest that you look at some of the various materials to learn how they're made and then tweak them to the need you have for a particular scene... @starwarsknower said: EDIT: And I dont understand the readme, it is all jargon and complicated. I assume that you're very new to renders and render techniques... You may call it jargon, but we're only using the standard terms used within this business... If you select another render engine like Maxwell, Vray, Indigo and others, you'll learn that they all use the same jargon, terms etc... Please believe me when I say that once you learn these terms and get more familiar with renders, it's not that complicated...

Sorry if that came out wrong, I didn't mean to call the guy an idiot, what I meant was it's stupid not being able to have materials on the model.

Try using an unbiased render method. I suggest Metropolis Light Transport for interior and product renders.

Check out my DevantART I made for my renders, and please comment on them http://starwarsknower.deviantart.com/

@starwarsknower said: Kl thanks, I still dont get what difference it makes when you put it on the red or green axis, I cant find anything different. But I see now when you put it on the blue it doesnt fall over though. Thats cool. If you put it in red or green the cylinder will fall over but never roll. Try pointing it in different directions not on axis and you will see some really wierd behavior

for some reason the joints weren't connected and after I tried to mess around with it SU kept closing... anyway, not sure if that was the case for you, but it looked good.

@starwarsknower said: I was looking through the programme files, and I found some strange icons that I didn't reckognise. Try doing this to see them yourself: Go to Programme Files> Google> Google Sketchup 6> Plugins> SketchyPhysics> Images Scroll down and see that there are record play rewind fast forward and some more tools not used in there. Really wierd isn't it? Do you know what they are? Just old icons. There used to be a feature to record and playback animations but it hasn't worked for a while. Others are just obsolete. Ill remove them in the future. Chris