Okay, hopefully I can get the observer written and working next week.

Work-around: Paste in place a copy of the target mesh into another Sketchup session. Paste the drape lines into the same session above. Create as layer called "drape" and make it active. Drape the lines onto the copy of the target mesh. Open the target mesh group, select a draped line and right-click > select all on same layer. Group, then copy the draped lines and paste in place into the original file. If find that by isolating the target mesh in this way also speeds up the slow drape operation considerably.

An update to this: This also occurs in SketchUp 7. And I've realised that the components isn't missing, but instead it's the position of the copies that's incorrect. They all end up in the position of the original.

Hi Thom, Have you tried Karpo yet? I'm not sure about the results but there might be a format combination that works for you.

I remember this coming up years ago and the problem was the heavy cost of licensing for the use of caramel's raspberry!

That Photomodeler look interesting for modeling existing buildings. (I work in an architect office.) But I really feel we need another solution for placing existing models. The views we need to show the client or the council rarely ever is anywhere near close to fit the demanding restrictions of Photomatch. And we rarely get a perfect un-obscured view. And to add to that, 90 degree angles are rare! At least in this old city. (Yes, multipin system for textures would be nice. As well as being able to place a pivot point for rotating the texture.)

Ah yes! Exactly what I was looking for. And more! Thanks for your quick reply. Trees ahoy!

You need to do more than just select the edge. The softening effect is a combination of both the edge and an adjacent face. So long as you select edges and at least one adjacent face for each edge, you should be able to simply turn down the smoothing slider to unsoften them.

I havent had this with the stamp tool before, but i have had problems with grouping/ungrouping subsmoothed geometry. No idea why it does it Not sure why softening the edges is causing the model to lose its colour either, it stays put in my little experimets.

I will have a look at it. Thanks for the tip. The problem is at the office everyone has their own set and layout for the toolbars so if one person needs to update some SU images then we end up with deviating images. I'll add a request for custom aspect ratio.

. Just wanted to subscribe to this post and the pending "release"... /D

rE: Arch. renderings - Chipp created this... http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=5300# maybe you posted this elsewhere around here, already, Chipp?

That was the culprit! I always export large and resample down because I don't like the SU AA, but I'd never turned it off.

Open the old SU file with the camera position you want / need, save the model under a different file name (so as to not mess up the old one you're keeping for record), save the camera position as a scene, delete unwanted scenes. Use PageExIm available from Smustard to export the scene. Open updated SU model, use PageExIm to import the scene into your new model. That should do the trick, make sure you don't have conflicting scene names.

I've managed to match the photos close enough now. I took some extra time to model some extra surrounding buildings for reference and ensure their height was correct. That helped alot. I don't use PhotoMatch to model buildings or extract textures from, just to get the correct perspective for the model so I can drop it into Photoshop and then work on it from there.

Well, Bob, some say they experience slower performance with SU6 - others say SU6 is faster. For animation some still use SU4 because there they had a (temporary) fix for the irritating shadow flickering. I started with SU5 (free) and only purchaesed the Pro license when SU6 came out so there are many pro features I cannot compare (most of these features are now included into the free version, too). But that's a different story - at the end we'll end up hijacking Tom's thread...

It is very easy if you can create two pins more to position the image in the face. Then you can texture the whole model with an image like projected.

You should start with these settings because every scene can have its unique settings which is inherited when a new scene is created. So if you already have your scenes, you should do this setting at every scene and update it.

Got a sample model?

Other examples: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=4721