Sketchup Help with turned leg - 1 for Dave!

[John McM]

Dave,

I've been playing at drawing a turned leg but it has me beat, especially the pommel transition. Any chance of 1 of your quick little videos?
Many thanks

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Hi John,

Quicker than I can make a video, I can post a link.

Try this and let me know if it makes sense.

 

[John McM]

Thanks Dave, it was that tutorial that prompted me to have a go. I'm still stuck with 3 things
1 you somehow manage to get the pommel to protrude through the extended curve, mine alaways just meets the square face. Maybe I am not extending curve enough?
2 The 'intersect selected', are you dragging a box around the pommel/round junction? When I do it, SU goes all weird. Do you need a fancy graphics card for handling turnings in SU?
3 Whats the scaling up idea about?

Yours confused

 

[SketchUp Guru]

John, sorry for the confusion. Let's see if I can unconfuse you.

1. It could be that you aren't drawing the extensions on the curves far enough out. They need to extend a bit beyond half the diagonal length on the end of the square section of the leg.

2. I usually just triple click with the Select tool on the geometry I want to select but you could drag a selection box around the part you want to select. Use a right to left selection box around where the intersection will be made. That'll select all of the geometry in that area that even just falls within the selection box. Doing this will select less geometry and may reduce the load on your computer. This might make your graphics card happier.

3. The "scaling up" thing is used to prevent possible gaps from being created. Caps in the surface may occur when SU tries to create very tiny faces. It won't skin those over. To avoid that problem I scale up before doing things like the intersection that might form those little faces. SketchUp will fill the faces after scaling up and keep them filled once they are so you can scale back down and not lose the faces.

How's that?

By the way, do you have Skype?

 

[John McM]

Thanks for that Dave, will have another bash tomorrow. Don't have Skype but it's on my to do list.
Thanks again.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Glad to help.

If you get Skype set up and want to do it, we can set up a "live" demo session and try to cover something like this pommel or whatever.

 

[John McM]

Dave, I've had another play and discovered I was doing 2 things wrong.
1 I had OpenGL off, turning it on makes a massive difference.
2 I was only extending the curve parallel to the red axis and I needed to also extend it in the green direction as well to get the pommel to intersect properly.

Dooh.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

Glad you got it worked out, John. Good work.