@gaieus said:

Hi Tim (and welcome)

I think it has always been impossible to create an empty component or group but at least you can create an "ultimately small one"; just one endpoint (more exactly, "theoretically" two - with a line of 0 length between them).

Here is one attached (it's in the origin). Note that with the left to right select method or with the '"select all" command (Edit menu) you cannot even select it. You can select it with just clicking on it or with the right to left select method (or from the outliner).

(I still regularly visit both SU GGroups... )

Csaba...Nagyon köszönöm szépen a kís ajándékra! (is that the right case ending there?) De sajnos a Skippy-t nem láthatom...

I remember putting in a request for a Create Empty Group Ruby, and being told not to be so daft, and to do it the way that I outlined. But it was a long time ago...and my memory isn't what it was...

@wo3dan said:

Tim,

Why easy if you can do things in the difficult way?

This might be what you need. make use of the +/- selecting method with Shift.
When there is no empty space to deselect then:
%(#0000FF)[**- just click on a face;

• hold Shift while clicking on that same face again.**]

You will have nothing selected by then.
Wo3Dan
p.s. It's not all rubbish in Google Groups!

Yeah, sorry, I should have explained...I can only use one hand, and Shift-click isn't assigned to any of my mouse buttons in SU. So Shift clicking would entail taking my hand off the mouse, hitting shift twice to lock, grabbing the mouse, triple clicking, taking my hand off the mouse, hitting Shift again to unlock it....

That's why my workflow requests probably look a little odd to people from the outside...

Okay, it's a bit of a kludge...

I've been messing around with texture and lightmap baking in my favourite renderer, Cheetah3D...

Then I thought, what if I re-imported the texture maps back into SketchUp? And this is the result...

Here's a video: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Mp3eHtGLw

The workflow in Cheetah is, choose your mesh, 'bake' its texture...you get a UV-unwrapped, rendered texture map of your surface with all shadows, caustics, etc on there... you then simply re-apply the unwrapped, baked texture in your material's Colour channel. Because it's UV mapped, it wraps itself perfectly back around the geometry.

Of course, It only works for flat surfaces when you re-import these maps into SU...but this got me thinking... What if SU could bake & wrap its own shadows & textures? The shadows would then simply exist as part of the surface's material definition. The speed increase you get in rendering animations is phenomenal: that 46-sec video on YouTube rendered in around eight minutes -- about 5-6 times faster than if you rendered it with OpenGL shadows.

And we'd get rid of the flickering shadow problem...

(I realise this won't work if the sun has to move in your animation)

So this is where you've all been hiding...nobody ever tells me anything....

I gave up going to the Google groups because basically, in the words of Eric Cartman, "They totally suck ass." These forums are so much more usable, kudos to Coen and Gaieus...

Anyway, I'm trying to make an empty group. Why? To use as a 'deselector'. In the Mac version, you can't click on the Model Name in the Outliner to deselect everything, and sometimes you're so zoomed in, there's no free space to click in.

So I make two groups, then group them. The delete the two sub-groups...the enclosing group disappears...It never used to be like that, did it?