thats a very good tip to me too. i used to create handrail by just pin point centre lines, create posts(and paste them in order) and then run the follow me to create railings/balustrades...

Hi lilleskut,
To do roof, what I do is, when the wall is created, use the offset function, create the width of your soffit, then extrude your soffit depth then build the roof on top, that way it will create the depths you want as shown on the pic(well, you dont need to extrude the depth of soffit from your pic)
To do equally spaced column (also refer to the sketchup menu or linear array and polar array), draw one of the columns, find out what is the spacing between each column, say, you have 5 cols in total, draw the first one (make it as group/block - thats what I will do), select the column, ctrl left click and use move to the copied column, say 1000mm apart, then before you finish the job, type *4, then you will have 5 columns equally spaced.
In order to join the column to roof, as for myself, I will just extend each column pass the roof, turn the xray mode on, draw lines to intersection to roof and delete unwanted lines, but am sure there must be an easier way to do that.
Hope thats any help to you.

just as Chris and Alan said, some of your walls are not on the same geometry, so if the wall thickness is not the same on one wall, no matter how you push or pull, you will hit a problem. (ie. not forming an opening)
Best to turn on the axis colour under the styles menu to check if the walls are on the same plane.
I don't think its that hard to fix the problem. you just need to check your wall thickness before you do any extruding. It doesn't matter whether the walls are square/perpendicular to each other or not, because as long as your walls are with the same thickess(to each wall), you can use the ucs (axes tool) to set each walls x, y, and z axis.
Hope thats any help to you.

Although I am a beginner myself, my beginner tip would be:
First thing before you draw anything, make sure you are drawing in the right unit.
Same with importing a drawing. Make sure on the options tab under review icon, check if it selected the same unit style as your drawing, or else the imported drawing would be wrong scaled.

I see. thanks Iglesias. So to make the shape shown on starting slide. I create a circle (with 24 segments as default), then draw a circle each snap to midpoints, then delete anything unwanted to create the shape.

Just wondering if sketchup got a function like array (or polar array) just as in autocad, which makes life a lot easier when rotating things(or copying).

urm... just looking at the starting slide, how do you slice profile 20 divisions or fillets??
Many thanks

Thank you so much for all of your help. It is all singing all dancing now.

Thanks for the tip. However I tried using the 96 dpi one and still the same effect on ver7. colour still not displaying as normal.

Hi all,
I currently saw the newer version of sketchup and downloaded the ver7. When I am opening an existing ver6 file on ver7, some of the material on the drawing changed its colour completely. Material I used usually created using the textured image from a jpg file. the sketchup software doesn't seemed to like some of the jpg file, as it will display it as a totally different colour of the original jpg. on ver6, i used the match colour on screen to cover such problem, but this doesn't seemed to work on ver7 as the jpg file will appear as a "broken tv" colour with lots of vertical lines with the colour red, green, yellow all over itself.
I checked the jpg file and even re download the file itself and it seemed to be okay when display on the picture viewer with the correct colour.

My question is, is this simply a bug? or is there a way to solve this problem? I don't want to switch versions between 6 & 7, as I like some of the features on 7 but don't want to switch back to ver6 unless i havent got a choice.

Forgot to add this, in case anyone wonders which jpg i have having problems with, I used the images downloaded from the Marshalls website:
http://www.marshalls.co.uk/select/swatches.php?specialist=Water+Management&group=Permeable+Paving&material=&product=Priora+%28ML%29&ID=0
when clicked on one of the patterns, I could download the 300dpi onto the desktop to apply as material on sketchup later on.

Many thanks

Vinnie