I mostly got an SSD for my amateur music production - initially because of the excellent streaming performance for audio tracks and samples.
But the biggest boon has been the ability to record acoustic instruments while sat at my PC - together with big slow cooling fans, it means I have a full power desktop machine that is virtually silent. And being able to hear the birds singing outside during those long SU modelling sessions is marvellous!

Great aren't they - I like to have a little break from working now and then - set a big file transfer going - and then listen to the silence!

@mike lucey said:

What surprises me is that average, well educated people here in the EU have little or no idea about how Governments and Banks actually work. I really think it about time that these subjects be brought into the secondary school syllabus, so when a student reaches 18 they will be able to make an inform decision on what way they vote.

But the education system is provided for us by the very same state that has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Were such a thing incorporated into a "national syllabus" one can be sure that it would merely become part of the overall system of "manufacturing consent" - teaching only superficial explanations that re-enforce the idea that the current system is a "best possible compromise" that it is unproductive to question.

The teaching of History in schools is a prime example of this - we learn much about royal lineages, and ancient civilisations too remote to offer an insight into current world problems - but any mention of grass-roots movements for reform is scant and often negative in tone (e.g. the Levellers, Luddites etc.) And there is always a flavour of Nationalism - e.g. we are taught here that the UK/USA 'won' the 'War in Europe', barely a mention that victory was only assured through the huge sacrifice of Soviet citizens (over 90% of Allied casualties in that theatre), or that the Soviet Union was the only major European nation to gain territory. Those of all nations who defended us from invasion by fascism were undoubtedly brave and should be celebrated - but the UK didn't 'win' any greater status in the world, and was left in a mire of National Debt far in excess of the current 'crisis'.

I bring up that subject because the post WWII era also offers hope - despite the enormous debt and deprivation of that first decade after the conflict, it was also the time that a universal right to education, healthcare, housing etc. was recognised and formally added to UK government statutes. Despite there being "no money", the will and way was found to build millions of new homes, along with schools, hospitals, and the investment to get industry working again - totally debunking the argument that state debt is the evil cause of the current crisis, and that 'tightening our belts' is the only solution. (that one is really starting to sound like a stuck record!)
This only happened because of the millions of citizens who made it clear that they would not tolerate (or vote for) a return to the 1930's status quo that had done so little to alleviate citizen's suffering during the 'great depression' - and that was a result of their own personal experiences and the various labour movements, not of something they were taught at school.

There also a handy plugin from Liquid98 called "Boolean Helper" that gives you a couple of new toolbar buttons for very quickly scaling up and down - there's a choice of scale factors, and it even automatically zooms to make sure you can see everything when the size changes.
DOWNLOAD LINK

Hi all,
Figured I'd dip my toes into animation, so I downloaded Blender, and imported a few old SU models to have a tinker with.
After a few tests, my first preference was for Collada as the import/export format, as it seems to preserve Components and Groups more elegantly; making the model easier to navigate - until I noticed that in some models, objects were imported at wildly different scales.
I'm guessing that Blender is using the scale that the component was originally modelled at, and the scaling of the component instance is ignored - the vast size differences would then be explained by lots of scaling up and down to get around the "small geometry" problem (many models are 'life-sized' electronics components).
Indeed, making my component instances "unique" and re-scaling within component editing mode seems to give much better results.

But is there an easier way that I'm missing? - and is this generic to all Collada exports, or is SU doing things right, and it is Blender which is messing things up?

Thanks in advance for any help - if it weren't for this forum, the boss would find me out for the 3D noob that I really am!!

Hi there,
This is a well known SketchUp problem.
Although it will happily display objects of any size, it has problems making new geometry that is "sub-millimetre" in size.
I'm not quite sure what the technical reason is - I think is has something to do with the way that SU uses the OpenGL features of your graphics card to make life easier on your main CPU.
The usual way to deal with this is to scale up the thing you are making, do your edits, and then scale down again. I tend to scale by 1000 so that millimetres become metres - but smaller scale factors may work depending just how small your parts are.
A good tip (which I learned here of course!) is to make the thing you are editing into a Component. Copies of components will always share the same shapes, materials etc., but they can be scaled independently. By making your object a component, you can easily work on a scaled up copy positioned well away from other parts of your model. When you exit the component edit, the changes will copy across to your 'life size' original, and with no risk of accidentally moving it out of position, or accidentally selecting some other 'tiny' parts that you can't see when zoomed out.
An even lazier way is to just model everything at a larger scale (e.g. metres instead of mm), and then scale the whole model down when you need to export it, or take dimensions.

I don't mean to knock the scientists at all, they're looking for a solution to a problem that's already with us - good luck to them.
But the "Solves World's Waste Problem" headline and reporting? - kind of has a subtext of; "Yippee, so it's OK to carry on producing lots of unnecessary junk, after all". Would a report about the benefits of buying food at a farmer's market without all the long distance transport, polystyrene trays and clingfilm get as much publicity? (if you are one of the lucky few that has one nearby) - I doubt it somehow.

BTW - the article was a bit too technical for me. What is it exactly that they turn the plastic into? Does it taste good?

@mike lucey said:

There is something very comforting about steam trains.

Even though I'm too young to remember seeing them ploughing the main lines, I still have a fondness for them.
I think in part it's the sense of being able to see how they work, no hidden-away "black boxes" like modern technology. And of course, all those little design flourishes that show the pride of the original builders, and the restorers.

I'm lucky enough to have the Keighley and Worth Valley line just up the road - quite a little collection they have now, despite the line being only a few miles - here's a link... KWVR
Best of all, every autumn they raise funds by putting on a massive real ale festival - 100+ ales, live bands all day in the main loco shed, seating in the old Pullman coaches, and even hand-pulled ales in the buffet cars of the trains so you can saunter back-and-forth through the beautiful Yorkshire countryside with the taste of a perfect pint and the delicious smell of the roasting coals.
A truly grand day out - I recommend it to anyone - the boozing is always very civilised, so perfectly 'child friendly' too (I hear that even lager drinkers enjoy it!).

Saddest of all is that nobody seems to have learned the lessons from the 'sub-prime' collapse a few years back. The politicians (certainly here in the UK) seem to have no better idea than to ask the very people who caused the problem to suggest a way of fixing it. Many of the banking executives sacked as 'sacrificial offerings' to appease public opinion have quietly walked straight into jobs as government advisors on 'Budget Responsibility'.
Even more scary is the possibility that once people see through the 'solutions' of mainstream politics, the door is wide open for more extremist political views to seize upon the situation with false promises for desperate folks to clutch at (e.g. Nazism's popular appeal following the inflationary crisis in 1930s Germany).
Particularly with the mis-handling of things in the 'Euro-zone' one can't blame people for being attracted to the idea of 'pulling up the drawbridge' and turning to isolationism/nationalism - but this is no solution, as the economic powers behind the problem have no loyalty to any particular nation. They are happy to take their money anywhere that they feel the local laws are most friendly to their 'assets'- and to hold governments to ransom by vowing to take employment opportunities and tax payments elsewhere if they don't get what they want.

@gaieus said:

For such, organic "sculpting" I could suggest two plugins (both cost a bit of money but not much). One is Vertex tools which is perfect for terrain shaping and the other is Artisan that is a more generic but extremely powerful organic tool.

For such "organic" modeelling and complex textures, I also suggest checking out Blender.
It's free, open-source software, and may better suit what you want to do - though be warned, it is a mightily complex bit of kit, so not half as easy to learn/use as Sketchup!
It will also happily import Collada or OBJ exports from Sketchup - so you can have the best of both worlds; using SU for ease of modelling, and Blender for the "fairy dust" to make things look prettier.

@xchange said:

about how to "stay on the axis" so to speak?

When I'm building something around the 'origin' axes like this, I find it can still be helpful to put in a guide line (co-linear with the axis). Just select the "Tape measure" tool, and double click when you get an inference to the axis you want to use.
Guide lines seem to allow more varied kinds of inferencing than the axis alone - e.g. to find where the axis intersects a face.

Follow me will usually work OK even on "circles" with only a handful of sides - I often use hexagonal "circles" (to model very small parts that won't be seen in detail) and find that it will usually still generate a smoothed surface.
This makes me wonder, has your "top" been created by many small "follow me" actions (one for each segment)? This can sometimes create disjointed lines due to the way that Sketchup calculates the start and end when the path is not a closed loop - the individual bits don't always "heal" together well.
You can use "Follow me" on multiple "segments" all in one go, so long as their ends all join together, by selecting them all together before "following". You might also want to search out a plugin called "weld", which lets you heal curves back into a single piece (very handy, as many operations in SU result in curves/circles being broken into sections) - that plugin is so useful, it's hard to understand why it's not a native SU function!

If you do want more detail in your circles, then after selecting the circle tool, simply type a number followed by "s" into the VCB to set the number of sides. Alternatively, you can open the "Entity Info" dialogue, select the circle, and type a new number of sides - but this way can have unintended effects if the circle is already attached to other geometry, usually better to draw them how you want to begin with. Follow me will then use as many facets as there are sides to the "circle".

D'oh moment for me!
I spent so long trying to align things using the rotate/protractor tools - when all I needed to do was type "Align" into the search box and intall this super plugin!

Many thanks Didier, you have made my Sketchuping so much easier!

@wo3dan said:

Change individual group's axes by redrawing them within the group's context.

Seems so obvious with hindsight! Thanks for the tip.

@noelwarr said:

Sketchup is based on floating point data structure. These are inherently inaccurate.

Quite so, I have to deal with this often in my "alter ego" as an audio DSP designer.

The fact that us humans use decimal, and PC's use binary also has some consequences for accuracy.
Just as decimal cannot exactly represent 1/3, binary cannot exactly represent 1/10 - the value to be represented and the number base have unshared prime factors.

A lot of software will display rounded values, so that they look a little more palatable to us humans - but it is a mistake to assume that the display value is exactly the same as the underlying float number. If your display is telling you that your dimension is exactly 0.1units, it is probably lying, as a float number simply cannot have exactly that value, only an approximation.

Never occured to me before, but in this binary age, maybe the traditional "powers of two" divisions of the inch make more sense than decimal notation - those power of two factors can always be represented precisely in binary (up to the limit of the bit-depth) - so 1/16" really is 1/16, whereas 0.1m is only pretending!

Works a treat, thanks TIG.

@thomthom said:

Enough for what

He he, yes I was being lazy with my words! "Enough" meaning - enough for the model to meet its ultimate purpose, as decided by the end user (or his/her client/customer).
As you also hinted - the original question is unanswerable because we do not know the purpose of the model - without this information no definitive answer can be given, nor can the OP gauge the usefullness of any advice offered.
The "universe" to "atoms" comparison is interesting - the units within SU are only notional, we are free to interpret the text labels as we wish. I could arbitrarily decide that the letter "m" really means miles or microns (or Mega light years!) if it made my model making more simple - and this would require no adjustment to the internal number representation of the software. In fact, we can see that this is even advisable sometime - use metres as a millimetre substitute to avoid the "small faces" problem.

Surely, the question really should be "Is sketchup accurate enough?"

For example, I create a lot of files for sending to a CNC laser cutting machine. The cutting head movements are driven by stepper motors. Thus, there is a maximum precision that can be reached by the machine (one step of the motor transformed by whatever "transmission" is used.)
So, just like SU, the machine does not draw true circles - there are a fixed number of points on the bed to which the head can be sent, with a touch of intertia smoothing the steps a little on the way.

So, if I want to obtain e.g. a sufficiently smooth curve, I must judge how many edges are needed based on the precision of my machine and behaviour of the material. 1000 edges would be silly - it would generate a massive CNC file when uploaded to the machine for absolutely no improvement in the end product. If I'm making a hole to clear a 3mm bolt, I may use as few as 10 edges - the bolt head and/or washer will easily cover any slight "raggedness" of the circle.

So it all comes down to tolerances - if you saw a plank of wood by hand, there is effectively no difference between 15mm and 15.00034532mm - the "precision" of the numbers is illusory, as you can't possibly cut that accurately.

I concur with ArCAD's experience - the way DC's are deployed completely hampers their usefulness.
I have plenty of programming experience, so found the maths side not too bad and managed to create several DC's that I thought would be useful....
....until I looked in my Components toolbox - "Part#1", "Part#2", "Part#3",..etc...
...which I then rename as "Part Small", "Part Big", "Part Huge" etc. and then try to remember to drag the right one into the model so that I don't then end up with another new series of #1,#2,#3... (except that I will anyway if I alter any parameters "on site").
I think, at best, they can be used as a kind of templates for quick construction of regular "non-DC" components. But as has been pointed out already, SU is so fast to model with, that I may as well have just built "Part Small", "Part Big"... as separate components in the first place.
To be more useful, I would like to see something like...

• Only ever one definition (visible?) in the component toolbox.
• A new native component attribute "Suffix", visible in the Outliner - e.g. for a component called "Nut", we could add "M3","M4" etc. according to parameter values - purely as "aliases" to help us see what is what and for use in reports, but not changing the DC definition in any way.
• "Variants" itemised according to their parent definition and sorted by parameter values in reports. So I can quickly see that I have used 25 M3 Nuts, rather than having to check each "Nut#x" component individually to see see what parameters it has.

In principle, DC's have a lot of potential - but I doubt it can ever be realised unless the implementation is thoroughly overhauled.

Sorry if my criticism seemed too harsh. It was not meant to be so - I quite agree with the sentiment that 'the punishment should fit the crime'
But the soldier has been judged innocent of any crime, and I doubt that any of us here has any better knowledge than the court that judged him.

Indeed - one can find an anecdote to demonstrate the "truth" of almost any given belief. We should be analysing whether the relation between economic power and justice is systemic, rather than demonising any one individual when we are not in full possession of the facts of his case.

PS) I think the word "today" is rather redundant - has there ever been a time when power did not make leniency more likely?