@mike lucey said:

@willpittenger said:

@hellnbak said:

Ah good, another chance for me to demonstrate my ignorance.

Could somebody please explain a little what you guys are talking about?

IRC is Internet Relay Chat. Like the forums, but a bit more real time. The link is for the Wikipedia page on IRC.

Its an interesting read Will. It also cast some light on my ignorance

Could you bullet list the main advantages of such a system of communication?

Mike

Compared to the forums? Well, there is one main advantage: How quickly you get a response. We are talking about near real time. That might or might not happen here. Also, I used to use the forums at space.com. Those are long gone. But the space channel at Freenode has been there for 8 years and and still going strong.

@hellnbak said:

Ah good, another chance for me to demonstrate my ignorance.

Could somebody please explain a little what you guys are talking about?

IRC is Internet Relay Chat. Like the forums, but a bit more real time. The link is for the Wikipedia page on IRC.

@chris fullmer said:

Is there a way to join in via some website? It would be much simpler to build the SU integration if we could just use an html client. (I'm admittedly not that irc savy anymore. It's been many moons since I last used irc regularly).

Try http://webchat.freenode.net.

@willpittenger said:

If I get interest, I may start one on Freenode. I have two options. One would be ##sketchup for general SketchUp discussions. (The extra pound sign signifies that the channel is a topic channel rather than an official support channel.) The other would be #sketchucation. That would require support from the founds of SketchUcation and would compliment these forums.

Well, I founded irc://irc.freenode.net/%23%23SketchUp. Chatzilla users can use irc://freenode/%23%23SketchUp instead. Come and join me.

@thomthom said:

There is a nasty bug where selected geometry will have the Soften Edges function applied to it when the SketchUp window becomes unresponsive.

Say you have a group selected, you do some operation that takes a while - the SU UI becomes unresponsive. When the operation is done and the UI responds a Soften Edges operation is applied to the selected geometry.

I also notice this when I minimize and restore the SU window.

For this reason alone I constantly press Ctrl+T to deselect geometry as quickly as possible to avoid soft+smooth properties from being modified by this bug.

Well, for my model, that would be a lot of operations. Auto-save being a primary example. You can't live without it. But until 2013 arrived, I was saving as much as I was editing--even with the file living on a SSD. It still takes longer than it should, but is improved. Still, it would be nice if saves could occur in the background. Trouble with the auto-save is that SketchUp just pauses without giving you a chance to deselect things.

I also mentioned that ungrouping large groups causes it for the former group contents. You can't deselect the group and still do that operation.

@willpittenger said:

It seems that every now and then, SketchUp gets confused about which edges are soft/smoothed and which aren't. This seems to be triggered most often by Intersect Faces (on selected faces only even when the edges in question aren't on interesting faces) and grouping/ungrouping faces with smoothed/soft edges.

Well, after having spent umpteen hours fixing my model, I can provide more details. I still don't know more about the circumstances that led to the errors. But I can tell you more about the results. Maybe that will help track down the culprit.

First, if a non-smooth/soft edge is associated with two (and only two) planar or nearly planar faces, it may be smoothed/softened.

Second, suppose you have an area that started out as the output of the sandbox from contours function. In my case, I wanted most of many of my sandbox areas to be mulched. But part of such an area might be too steep. So I then create a nice curve above it that follows where the gradient changes and use the push/pull tool to extrude that through the sandbox area. Intersect faces then creates the dividing line. The key is that some edges will be split by that curve. If the above event unsmoothes/unsoftens one of the fragments from that edge, all the fragments will be affected.

@unknownuser said:

@willpittenger said:

Be nice,

sorry. didn't mean to come off that way.
i was just confused by your question is all.

Actually, I got misquoted. I believe I was saying that it would be nice to be able to reproduce it in a predictable manner. But I don't really know the circumstances other than certain events "seem" to be involved and it requires a really large complex model.

@db11 said:

ThomThom has a great post on his website explaining the difference:

http://www.thomthom.net/thoughts/2012/06/soft-vs-smooth-vs-hidden-edges/

Thanks. It is unfortunate that SketchUp's own documentation doesn't discuss that.

@rich o brien said:

@willpittenger said:

If I edit these components direct, the edges are correct. But if I then import them into my parent model, it has troubles.

Well documented and known issue

I don't suppose we might see a fix sometime soon.

@unknownuser said:

it's possible you have invalid geometry in one model then when you import it into a new model, it's fixed because you have the preference setting 'auto fix problems when they're found' ticked.

I turned that off a while back. I always want to know ahead of time when it thinks it found something. And it doesn't alert.

@unknownuser said:

but that just one of a ton of possibilities.. you're going to have to be more specific/provide examples in order to get some help directly related to what you're seeing.

Be nice, but so far, it only happens on complex models/components. Plus, the times I listed may not be correct. All I know is that I see errors I have to fix. And spend a [highlight=#ffff80:165g44ow]LOT[/highlight:165g44ow] of time fixing those errors.