I've been playing with modelling a trout with the intention of converting it to a mould (injection mould) and using it to cast soft plastic fishing lures. I made different model the other day, printed it, shot some plastic through it and it worked really well so am going to make some more It's going ok (see attached)... but I was wondering how people would go about adding the detail work such as scales and the gill plates (better than I have... first try at this kind of surface detail work). Is there some way to make the textures with relief to 'wrap' around an object?

Ok.. tried it and it was a bit too aggressive in how many stray edges it removed on the first run though on default settings... I will play with it and see if I can make it work. Thanks for the suggestion!

Sorry for the late reply... life!

I've not seen this plugin. I will have to check it out!

I have access to all of this software and the entire Autodesk suite and we use Inventor as our primary CAD software, however, I am doing this with 14-16 year old kids and there is nothing better to learn how to work in a 3D space than SU and if I can keep everything in the one place, without having to switch between software then the kids are going to get the idea better and faster. SU is faster and more intuitive than most CAD software packages and the kids can use it for drafting before moving on to Inventor or Fusion 360 to do do our final plans and renders. With this, they are designing model cars for the F1 in Schools program where the emphasis is on the engineering and design process so we do as much virtual testing as we can to supplement the physical testing on cars we mill with our 3-axis cutter and print with our 3D printers. With all the incredible plugins people, like the those from the Sketchucation community, make SU is becoming as important for our analytical testing as it is for our CAD work Thanks again for all the work you guys do...

Not sure what I did different, but I got Flatten to Plane to do what I needed! Lots of cleaning up to do but it worked! Thank you all for your assistance

Flatten to Plane nearly worked. It projected edges but if edges weren't present, like with curved faces that curve under the shape that don't have boundary edges, it left them blank. I learned to make new work planes with it so this has been a plus

This is what I'm talking about:

On the left is the top view of a car concept we are playing with. The 2D view on the right was drawn first and the centroid found and labelled with the cross-hairs. Then I realised that we had made a mistake (not the axles... we haven't worked out how we will attach them yet), and the two top views are not the same. So I was hoping there might be something to make the left view automatically. I could get them to do it in Autodesk Inventor and then import it back into SU but was hoping to try and keep things all together.

I haven't gone through the other suggested plugins yet but will try them and see what they can do.

I'm fine with the centre of gravity and the centroid.. just wanting to know if there is something to make 2D projected geometry from 3D shapes?

Is anyone aware of an extension that can project the geometry of the current 2D view to a separate group (without volume)?

I have a need to find the footprint of complex shapes to work in conjunction with extensions that locate the centroid of a face and the centre of gravity of a group/component. I am currently drawing the top view separately so I can find the centroid and then modelling the 3D model to match. I am using this with school kids who are designing model cars to race in the F1 in Schools competition and we have found that a very close approximation of an aerodynamic property of an object called the centre of pressure can be found by finding the centroid of the car's footprint. Such an extension would help the kids a huge amount in their design and virtual testing phase before progressing on to virtual wind tunnel testing.

If such a plugin doesn't exist, I would love one of the developers here to make it a project I'm thinking of plugins such as the Flight of Ideas SVG extension which can create vector paths from 3D-to-2D projected geometry. It would be great if a plugin could do a similar thing to create different components for use within SketchUp

This is before I apply a material... so the default black line.

It's nearly 1am... will try tomorrow. Thanks for your help.