Dude! Way over the top. There are no adequate superlatives for this level of work. Flamtingletabulous doesn't even come close...

@l.frisken said:

I'm having trouble getting this boat hull for a paddle steamer that I'm building to subdivide nicely (it looks ok in sketchup but when rendered you can really notice the problems with it). Can anyone help me? It is to exact dimensions so I don't really want to change the overall shape too much.

Take a look at this one. I made a few minor changes to the geometry and got rid of the outright glitches...
paddle_steamer_x.skp

Edit: After I uploaded this, I took the top off to see what it would look like without being enclosed. This exposed another accidental surface on the inside of the hull that needs to be removed.

@marked001 said:

first image is so simple and clean...love it.

First computer room I've ever seen with no wires...

You're probably better off going with the material, but it's an interesting thing to model just for fun...

@smallfry said:

More views please!

Welcome to SketchUcation, Smallfry.

Here's another view, and the zip file below is the .skp for this model. It includes a five-twist moebius strip as well.

MobieusStrip.zip

@fbartels said:

PS Is the dome house still around?

I don't know if it's the same one, but I see this house every time I drive Interstate 40 through Yucca, Arizona...

The picture is a screen capture from Google Maps street view.

@escapeartist said:

OK, I tried a couple of variations on both suggestions to see what would work.

Excellent results! Persistence pays off...

@escapeartist said:

I see what you were saying... No, I'm definitely using the first function, the "ball in the box" icon in SD&S. It does add a lot of geometry though.

One of the things that you can do after the Subdivide & Smooth operation is to manually remove unnecessary geometry that was created in areas that remain flat, like the surface of the liquid in the glass.

Otherwise, there are lots of rendering experts on this board (I'm not one of them), so I'd recommend that you upload your model and have one of them give it a look.

@escapeartist said:

How to, in Sketchup?

I created a wineglass and added a surface to create the liquid. The only way I could think of to create the meniscus was to draw a bezier radius at the intersection of the liquid plane and the glass surface and then use the "follow me" tool around the edge. That went well - but when I applied SD&S, it created little "dents" at certain intersections which creates issues when the object is rendered.

Any suggestions on how to get around this, or how to create a better model in sketchup to avid this issue?

My guess is that the follow-me tool didn't create a perfect connection to the edge of the glass, and when you applied SD&S, the edge of your meniscus pulled away from the glass at every point that failed to connect.

Instead of the follow-me tool, make a flat surface that connects to the glass all the way around, then make a concentric circle inside that surface with the offset tool and pull it down with the move tool. That will make a meniscus that's properly attached, and it will generate less geometry if you SD&S it...

Caution, image may be considered NSFW.

http://forums.3dtotal.com/showthread.php?t=65531

And scroll down the thread to see the pre-production sketches and the wireframe...

You want to do dinosaurs? Cool.

Made with Whaat's SubDivide and Smooth plugin. Available at smustard.com...

Meh. The Last Supper has been parodied hundreds of times. The folks that get their panties in a bunch about things like this are actively looking to get offended.

Well. That's certainly ... unexpected.

@ecuadorian said:

That's why I came up with my own puzzle, Pilou. Anyone wants to give it a try?

@ecuadorian said:

This one is for the Japanese speakers and Japanese language learners in the forum:
3txq
What is the next character in the sequence?

I know nothing about Japanese, but congratulations to you and Pilou for seeing that the sequence was base minus two. Most folks have never heard of negative base numbers.

Once upon a time, I got into a session with a couple of programmers who were trying to find a non obvious way to hide information in a binary format. This is one of the things we came up with.

The following sequence is valid under this scheme:

1 = 1
2 = 110
3 = 111
4 = 100
5 = 101
6 = 11010
7 = 11011
8 = 11000
9 = 11001
10 = 11110

Can you see why?

Very nice job! That's my favorite use for SketchUp -- designing something and building it.

Wow! I'll be playing with this for the rest of the weekend. Thanks!

I ran across the OnLive logo last week, and decided to try to make it in SU. It was obviously created with a 2D graphics program, but it depicts a 3D shape. In fact, it's a compound moebius strip with three twists instead of just one.

Here's the original logo:

It was a real skull cracker to visualize where to put the lines while drawing it, but I enjoy a good geometry problem. I threw out the first two approaches, and I got this result on the third try:

And here's a side view of the model:

The smoothed shape is SubSmoothed twice from the proxy...

After 12 years, you've probably got a whole lot of stuff that starts up automatically, and 512k is just not enough room.

The first thing I would do is download the Autoruns program from here. It will show you everything that starts up when you turn the machine on, and it will let you block whatever you don't need.

As for Firefox, purge the cache (Tools, Options, Privacy, Private Data, Clear Now, Cache). It accumulates history as it goes, and it loads all that (and resolves network addresses) when it starts.