Another University dropout here too. I always thought that electronic engineers made useful gizmos, and was shocked to find out that all we did was number-crunch equations (the kind that working engineers just go and look up somewhere when they need them!) - and did coursework in Management Studies (screwing your workforce) and Marketing (deceiving your customers).
I realised long after that the purpose of my degree course was not to teach me to be a better engineer, but to gain a piece of paper that would let me 'jump the queue' into a management position with an employer, or to be a perennial academic - neither of which appeal to me at all.
That was twenty years ago, and I see no improvement - I squirm every time I see that media 'meme' about 'further education' being worth 'on average £xx,000 salary per year'

School, I am ambivalent about - like anything else, teaching can be done well, or badly. My science teachers were truly inspirational, and encouraged the interest that I already had, having identified it almost instinctively - so I did well, despite being uncomfortable with learning 'en masse' in a noisy classroom.
History, which I now know to be both fascinating and incredibly informative about the present - hated it. The teacher was, as far as I could tell, utterly uninterested in the subject (Bored of the repetition? His pet specialism not on the curriculum?)
Like it or not, school will always have an agenda - it is run by politicians when all said and done. It just ain't there to be interesting or informative, it is there to prepare students for the rough and tumble of becoming a cog in the machine. Some talented teachers are able to overcome that to a degree, but from my experience having worked as a school lab' tech', and folks I know with similar jobs, those kind of teachers are being driven away - they are dangerous, they teach people to think for themselves, they teach that there is more than just 'knowing your place' and being content with it.

Saddest of all, so many parents are content, or even expect as a 'right', that education is to be 'outsourced' wholly to the professionals. For sure, there are 'technicalities' that only a professional can pass on - but it is family, neighbours and friends who taught me knitting, gardening, the joy of a good book, a sense of moralty... and most of all to love learning itself. You don;t need a teaching certificate or limitless resources to pass on that - we are all teachers.

SU Pro can be re-installed just as usual using the licence key from your original authorisation e-mail - I have done this several times without any problem.

Sounds from the OP that he/she has already checked at least some of those threads (no pun intended!).
To me, it reads more like how to give the appearance of a thread but without adding extra geometry (even to draw a 'flat' helix on the surface would create many extra faces - might as well go the whole hog and model it fully)
Using a stripy material of some sort maybe? - I have no experience in that area, as cosmetics don't enter into my modelling, so I have no idea if that would be less 'greedy' than extra geometry.

Thanks for the link, Mike, looks really interesting from my first quick scan. And I quite agree, education and enthusiasm go together like fish and chips!
My ideal teacher - that's easy, anyone from the UK of a certain age will know just what I mean when I say, "Johnny Ball"!

@Marian. I sympathise your situation - I have spent many years of my adult life left unable to work due to forces beyond my control. I wish you every luck in finding a good employer.
I am very fortunate in the job I have now - but it has come about precisely because of interests that I took up as hobbies as a kid, some of which were encouraged as "extra-curricular" activities by inspiring teachers who did not see the passing of exams as the 'be all and end all' of education.

The 'box ticking' and 'exam league tables' are what annoy me most about the current education system here - the kind of practical/creative skills that Mike speaks of do not lend themselves well to that form of "intellectual accountancy", discouraging even the most open-minded and enthusiastic of teachers from nurturing talents that cannot be reduced to metrics (if they are even allowed the time and resources to do it).
The other side of the coin, surely, is the short-termism of the 'flexible job market'- almost gone are the apprenticeships by which industry invested time in training talented youngsters; the industrial era equivalent to a father passing the skills of his trade to his son in days long gone. This leaves school 'picking up the slack' to prepare kids for work - leading to an ever narrower curriculum targeted at the needs of large scale employers (almost exclusively 'service industries') - boring subjects in preparation for boring jobs, little wonder if the kids don't pay attention in class.

So my i-Wotsit can now be my "companion and side-kick", hmmm...

@unknownuser said:

Are "friends" electric? Only mine broke down, and now I've no-one to love.

@solo said:

Would anyone actually buy this?

Tamagochi? Furbies? Space Hoppers? - yup, it will most likely get its 15mins of fame before folks get bored of it and drift on to the next pointless waste of the world's resources.
If the guy is lucky, he'll be able to sell up 5mins before the craze dies, at an insanely inflated price, to the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation - Marvin, the paranoid android, and irritatingly cheerful electric doors coming soon! Oh, joy.

@krisidious said:

I love legos

Amen, brother - and those old instruction booklets always fascinated me too - my first exposure to "engineering drawings", which I have no doubt sowed the seeds for many of the skills I now use as an engineer.
One thing I am glad to see here, is some really creative modelling with only the most basic of cuboid blocks - that side of Lego 'sculpting' always impressed me the most.
Somehow I was always disappointed that Lego went down the road of so many 'custom' shaped bricks, towards kits that required much less assembly and 'guided' the imagination with pre-defined shapes - some of the smaller kits just seem a little too much like "Kinder Egg" toys to me somehow.

Wow - except that I saw them here, I would have easily mistaken those for photographs; the 'tile' pavement and the many sky reflections are particularly impressive - a completely cohesive scene.
Maybe add some graffiti, and some 'urban tumbleweed' (i.e. litter) - that is really the only immediately obvious difference from reality!

@gaieus said:

Any time I was in England, it was fine weather.

I am going camping in the middle of July, any chance you could be in the country then?
(If you could arrange to visit when we have a public holiday, you will be bought many beers, I am sure!)

Very impressive!
Just curious - how many designer-hours of work to produce this? It is such a vast project.

@gaieus said:

there's some rain almost every day.

My theory is that it was a denial-of-service attack by the European Central Bank to increase productivity - their austerity measures know no bounds!

I think we already had our summer in the UK a couple of weeks ago, had my shorts on for about five days, sweating like a pig in the office at work (air-con is also code 404 in UK offices!)...
...then we had an extra long bank holiday for the Queen's Jubilee, wa-hey four whole days off work - so naturally, autumn paid us a visit!

You're welcome.
I quite agree - I experimented with the demo's of quite a few CAD packages when we first started making our own hardware at work. IMHO, the speed and simplicity of modelling in SU more than compensates for the hassle of export "tweaking". (plus we have the friendliest and most helpful user forum, and all those incredible Ruby guys "upgrading" the software on a daily basis! Hint, hint )

Here's a few other little tips that may help when designing for laser...

• The 'underside' of parts will have a slightly wider kerf due to the way that the laser is focused. So export your outlines looking towards the side where the dimensions are most critical, especially for thick materials (> ~3mm).
• If cutting or engraving text, always convert to vector outlines, as fonts often do not translate well.
• Don't be tempted to butt parts up against each other to save space; leave a gap of a mm or two. 'Shared' cut lines will often get cut twice, and can spoil the edge of the first part if it moves slightly after being 'released' from the sheet.

Many small laser firms these days are using cheaper imported Chinese machines, and the software for these is often rather arcane and works in non-standard ways - for example our "LaserCut" software treats colours as different 'layers' but doesn't recognise genuine layers within the source file.
As a designer, how are you supposed to know this? So it seems odd to me that the guys who program the machines do not offer to optimise files at their end - a reasonable fee for an 'expert' to do this could be cheaper than paying the designer to spend hours revising their files until they hit on something usable!

Hope your project comes out well,
Trog.

Hi Anbar,
This is something that drives me nuts too - I design in SU for the laser machine that we have at work, and to be fair, often have similar problems with "native" AutoCAD files that we get sent in.
Another common problem I've found is that often each individual 'segment' is a closed curve in its own right, even for strictly 2D drawings and 'welded' shapes - so the laser will cut every segment twice over, and that really makes a mess!

First thing I would advise is to ask your laser service what (if any) other vector file formats they support. I have found for our machine (uses "LaserCut5" controller software) that Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) are the most reliable - which sadly, SU does not support, leading to the following workaround...

First I export individual faces as SVG files using the SU plugin from FlightOfIdeas, then import those into CorelDraw for "tidying up", from which I export them as .ai files. CorelDraw is a bit expensive, but I have heard on the laser forums that the freeware vector program InkScape can do this too.

Using extra 2D software as a 'middleman' is a bit of a pain, but it does offer a few advantages too...

• Easy to check if curves are closed; only closed curves will fill with colour (but remove fills before export as many laser machines don't understand them properly).
• Simplifies layout of 2D parts to make best use of the materials.
• The opportunity to replace SM 'segmented' curves with true vector curves for neater shapes (I put a small shape at the curve centres in SU to help with this).

Still far from ideal, but despite a lot of posting on laser machine forums, I have yet to find a better way - I would be very glad to hear if anyone has a simpler method (time to learn some Ruby I guess!).

Many thanks - that's a real time saver!

So the plugin was working OK before, but now is bugsplatting?
If that is the case, first question has to be - have you installed any other new plugins during that time?
It's possible for plugins to over-write standard Ruby routines that other plugins rely upon to work properly, so sometimes it can be an unrelated (and apperently working) plugin that is the the cause of problems.
For example, I notice you have SketchyPhysics in your plugins. Lovely as it is, it is known to alter some code that it shouldn't - and when I stop using it, several other plugins start working much better.
I simply turn SketchyPhysics off by changing the file extension on the .rb file, so I can easily turn it on again if I really need to use it. By systematically doing this with the .rb files in your folder, you can track down the culprit (assuming that clashing is the cause of the problem, of course!).

@gaieus said:

America's got talents: Ironball.

@dave r said:

I wonder the same thing. What do you do with that?

Self-sterilisation through stupidity is the only way to win a Darwin award without dying in the process - guess he wanted to be the first person to win one on live TV!

He he, If you haven't already done so, I strongly recommend reading the "Dirk Gently - holistic detective" books by Douglas Adams.
One of the running jokes is the sofa that Dirk has to squeeze past every time he leaves his flat - it is jammed in just the kind of position you describe.
So he programs his computer (a Mac no doubt, as Adams was a huge fan) to run a simulation which will tell him how to finally extricate the problematic furniture. But, no matter how many times he runs the simulation, it tells him that the sofa could not possibly have been got into that position, and will be forever impossible to remove!
You have been warned!

@fuzzion said:

esides having the ability to replace the mouse, the Leap Motion...

While it certainly looks to have the excellent control, these displays of "geek tai-chi" always leave me with a couple of questions...
When was the last time you painted a ceiling/garden fence etc.? - and, how did your shoulders feel the next morning?
While I could see lots of applications in gaming, music/media performance etc., I fear that these devices will lead to "mouse shoulder - the next generation" if they were taken up for 8 hours of CAD every day!
Maybe we could combine them with a 'green energy' treadmill that powers the PC - no more need to take time out from work to visit the gym!

I also use Sketchup mostly for creating laser cutting files.
My own experience is that AutoCAD (dxf,dwg) files rarely work well - for example, the segments making up a curve will often all be exported as many small 'closed' curves, such that every small segment is cut individually from one end to the other and back again, and often in seemingly nonsensical order.
For this reason, I tend to use the SVG export plugin that Jim suggested (together with CorelDraw or InkScape if I need to tweak the SVGs) - sounds like a hassle, but I find it can actually be far less labour intensive than trying to 'clean up' an AutoCAD file.
Of course, this will depend on what cutter/laser software you are using - so let us know what your spec's are; if they are the same as what I use here, I'd be happy to share what I've learned over the last year or two.

As with all things PC, it all depends where the 'weakest link in the chain' is.
In Adobe Premier, I have seen some marginal improvements - mostly in the responsiveness of the controls (presumably because less buffering is needed), and rendering times (faster access to 'source' files and virtual memory). But the gains I've seen are pretty small, as it is often the computation of the frames that really stresses the system.
For screen captures, I wouldn't expect huge gains either, as the 'bottleneck' is most likely the video codec itself. As with all compression, reducing the file size involves fiendishly complex maths to get as much 'squeeze' as possible with minimum side effects - writing the resulting frames to disk is relatively 'low demand' in comparison.
The gains when audio mixing and using 'virtual samplers' is much more significant because it is common to have dozens of files all being 'randomly' accessed simultaneously in real-time - and it is the dramatic reduction in 'seek' times when jumping from file to file that is the SSD's biggest advantage (hence the big reduction in boot up times as Windows accesses those 100s of dll's and startup 'services').

In terms of making models, the 'solid tools' are the only extra in SU Pro. If you find yourself doing lots of intersecting geometry (and them deleting the 'offcuts'), they can be very useful - but the intersection method can almost always achieve the same things (if you don't mind the extra work required for the 'cleaning up').
There is also a plugin "Bool Tools", available for only $10 that can add pretty much the same features to SU 'Free' - though I have not used it myself, so can't comment on its effectiveness or compatability.

If your models are only for your own reference, then Layout and Style builder are probably of little use to you. They are designed to make the process of producing documents with multiple views and 'artistic impressions' easier - so are really just for making 'pretty' documents for showing to customers, or drawings for sending to the 'shop floor' when someone else is doing the manufacture for you.