Rich_Winsor

A little like closing the barn door after the horses are gone, but check out this link to the Corsair website. You can test your power supply with literally nothing more than a paper clip. I had a rig that became increasingly unstable finally to the point of being unbootable. While in it's death throws it manifested numerous symptoms; memory error beep codes, video driver error messages, a totally unresponsive mouse and others I am probably forgetting. I troubleshot everything from the video and mouse drivers to swapping out memory chips to by passing the case power switch to testing the power supply and lord know what else before I came to the grim realization that the culprit was the motherboard itself. This pissed me off to no end since it was a very pricy top of the line MB and of course you have to tear your rig completely down to replace it. http://www.corsair.com/en-us/support/faqs/power-supplies

Drat! Someone's on to me.

So last Saturday night I sat down at the keyboard at 11:00 PM and worked on my site plan until 3:00AM at which time I reset all my clocks back one hour and went to bed. Does this mean that I only spent 3 hours on the drawing?

I would love to have the capability to be able to vary the sizes of distributed objects as well as the spacing and rotational angle, however I'm not sure I have the total grasp of the concepts necessary to make a feasible request. It's always interesting to me just what computer programs think "random" is. One could make the argument that any combination is possible. It just depends on the size of the sample and the time over which it is taken. It's the old "room full of monkeys banging away at typewriters" that would eventually write all the great works of literature if given enough time deal. Actually I have had this sick idea festering in the back of my mind that I should vary the heights of the trees to exactly correspond to the heights of the actual trees. This of course would require me to individually edit all 160 trees. Aaarrrggghhh! BTW, to update that room full of monkeys deal maybe it would be more appropriate to speculate that a room full of monkeys at the keyboard with Chief could eventually design the Taj Mahal.

I am truly blessed Lew. With all the good and bad decisions we end up making in life, somehow I managed to land on my feet in making perhaps the biggest decision of all, where we are going to live. Funny you should mention fencing and walk flows. After about 2 weeks on the property I made my first major investment and bought myself a Honda Recon ATV. I haven't regretted it for one moment since . The fences were all erected by the dear little lady who previously owned the place. She was a legend in the neighborhood on her tractor with her post hole digger. The fences do help control the flow of wild critters across the property. Here is a rafter of the local gals out for their morning constitutional.

OK, here’s the poop. First off thanks for all the suggestions. I had a play with this over the weekend and this is what I came up with. As suggested, there are several ways to go about spacing out and rotating a row of trees. But… but… but… there is no way I can find to automagically vary the heights of the trees. I’m a visually oriented guy and I start to glaze over when I’m 700+ pages into the manual and trying to sort out Absolute and Relative angles, so I prepared a little demonstration with a generic tree fitted with a dorsal fin to aide in observing the changes in object orientation. In the end I used a combination of approaches. I broke the trees into 8 groups of 20 trees each which also happens to be way they are laid out for irrigation purposes. Then I created 8 Polyline Distribution Paths using the Random Angle Object Orientation and increasing the mean height of the trees in each path to create a stair step effect. I chose the Polyline Distribution Path over the Transform/Replicate option because it offered the Random Angle feature. Finally, (and Glenn neglected to mention this ), I exploded the Distributed Objects which enables the selection of individual trees again and manually adjusted the heights of about 75% of them to get the desired ascending – descending effect for the whole line of trees. I won’t bore you with how long this process took but suffice it to say that if I was hiring Bryce to do it I would be out hundreds of dollars. Anyhoo, there they are. 160 trees with no 2 alike. BTW, this is for a site plan I am working on for my spread here. The area encompassed by the fence is exactly 2 acres and contains all of the structures on the property. I still have several structures and dozens of trees to add to the plan (file size is currently 18MB and climbing).

Wasn't that back when dinosaurs roamed the earth? Where did you play? My meteoric career was cut tragically short when I blew out my ACL in my sophomore year at San Jose State.

I don't know Cadman, when I placed both of those symbols in a plan neither one looked to be 3D. I've wasted all the time I'm going to trying to figure out how get the Plant Chooser and the Library Browser synced up. I have created a plan specifically for 3D plants and I just drag the symbol in question into that plan and see how it looks. Since I can rarely find the specific type of plant (especially trees) I want I usually end up picking out a symbol that resembles what I am looking for and going with that.

Here's my approach. Let me preface these remarks by saying that I run all my "A" programs on a dedicated stand alone workstation. If you are on a network I wouldn't necessarily advocate this approach. First off I almost never install a new program while connected to the internet (the rare exception being some software updates downloaded from the internet). Obviously I always try to obtain a hard copy (CD DVD etc.) of the software I buy and install. Once a program is installed I will then connect to the internet to activate and update it as necessary. This approach precludes having the installation programs running amok and installing all kinds of unnecessary things. The first thing I do after installing Windows is to systematically disable Windows Update, Messenger and Windows Firewall. I also run without any anti- virus software whatsoever. IMHO, antivirus software is by its nature a virus (a benign virus hopefully but a virus none the less) that always runs in the background using up valuable resources and interfering with normal computer operations. I don't use my workstation to surf the internet. I have older "retired" rigs that I use for that. I tend to upgrade at semi-regular intervals and when I do I usually upgrade everything at the same time. For example my previous rig was a Pentium4 running Windows XP Pro, Internet Explorer 8, Office 2003, Adobe Acrobat 9 etc. It was so stable and reliable that I used it until much of the software had become "sunset" and the advent of newer versions finally forced me to upgrade. Now I'm up to Windows 7 Ultimate, Internet Explorer 11, Office 2010 and Adobe Acrobat 10. When I get a good combination of compatible programs I rarely worry about updating them unless something comes along that is really worthwhile. I don't mind being a version or two behind what is considered to be cutting edge as I find these programs are usually more stable and have had any major problems resolved. What does all of this mean? You tell me. I find my rigs to be fast, reliable and crash free. And in the event that something should go terribly awry I am not above taking a night off and doing a fresh install of Windows and all my programs. In fact I advocate this practice from time to time to give your rig a new lease on life.

You could go to DJP's house.

Lisa, what Scott was so eloquently trying to say is that if you enable "show shadows" in the Render/ Preview Options section of the Preferences menu the shadows will always stay on (even when panning and rotating). A very nice touch. BTW, I think the speed with which the shadows are now rendered is more a function of an improvement in version X6 than your fast Mac. They are fast for everyone now.

I would be interested in knowing what kind of speed increase you realize if you get around to overclocking your CPU. I have never put the overclocking capabilities of my rig to use as for the most part the plans I work with haven't been that complex and I haven't seen the need. Nice crisp RT's BTW, and your second image reminds me that roundball season starts tonite.

LOL! I don't remember which of the first astronauts it was. Alan Shepard, I believe, who when asked what he was thinking while sitting on top of a rocket about to be launched into space replied that he was thinking that the rocket had been built by the lowest bidder. BTW, I think I'm beginning to see why your internet connection is so slow. Time-Warner isn't going to upgrade service to that overpass any time soon.

OK, does anybody have an easy peasy way to arrange 160 3D Italian Cypress trees evenly spaced along a 500 foot road so that they vary from 8 feet tall at one end to 30 feet tall at the other end and no two trees look alike? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Don't know why I didn't try this sooner but if you don't enter anything in the "Name" field of the Plant Chooser and instead just select a box in the "Type" field (along with any appropriate Sub-Type) and hit the Search Button you will get a list of everything of that type in the Browser. Unfortunately as Jon and Nic have noted you can't tell which ones are 2D and which ones are 3D. I too would be interested in a site for good quality 3D tree symbols since the Library and Bonus Catalog 3D offerings are limited at best.

It looks to me like you are trying to access the 3d feature while you are still in plan view. If you open or create your 3d view those options will be available to you. Most of the 3D dropdown menu items are unavailable in plan view.

Does anybody know of a way to get the Library Browser to display the plants by their Common Names and not the Scientific Names? I really don't want to become a Botany major just so I can locate a Walnut or Apricot tree. And of course as we all know by now the search feature is as useless as teats on a boar hog. I do realize that you can cross reference the names in the Plant Chooser but you have to enter each category of plant individually and there are dozens of categories.

I don't use the feature but I think this is what you are looking for.

Heaven knows I don't want to start a range war.... But I've read that the Mac division (as small as it is) is one of Apple's biggest cash cows. Why? Because the profit margin on those machines is very high. Translation, Apple is gouging you guys.

Those two layers are two of the basic AutoCAD layers. Whenever you open a new drawing (.dwg) file in ACAD it automatically creates layer "0". Once you dimension anything in the drawing ACAD creates the "Defpoints" layer. These layers cannot be deleted in ACAD.

Resistance is futile. It's a Window's world. BTW, what is Apple's market share these days?

I see Jintu got the transfer accomplished. Sorry, I got sidetracked last night and by the time I checked back you guys figured it out. Mick, I haven't tried to download or install anything yet, but after seeing Jintu's gorgeous sample I will definitely be checking it out. I was hoping you guys would get the process all smoothed out and then I will waltz in and reap the benefits.

Do you guys want me to transfer Mick's tutorial to the Corona thread? If I copy and paste Mick's original post (#38) the images transfer fine. If I copy and paste Jintu's copy of Mick's post (#41) the links to the images transfer and are active so the pics can be accessed. I would have just gone ahead and transferred the post but there seemed to be some question as to whether the steps were working properly or needed to be tweaked.

Mick, that thread is in the chatroom.

Just highlight Mick's post and copy it. Then go to the other thread and past it into the reply window. I think here is where I'm supposed to say ... easy peasy.