Turned Leg Challenge

[SketchUp Guru]

tnimble:

Ah, very good. While I didn't talk about that in my tutorial, that is an excellent method for keeping the file size down. If you are planning to add a mortise for a skirting bboard or a stretcher, it would be a good idea to split just the turned pat or split the leg component further into turned and unterned sections.

To answer your question, the way to make the seam line between components smoother is to place it in the neddel of a face rather than on the edge between faces. To do that in this case, you would rotate the turned sections before adding the square parts. Or you could rotate the path prior to running Follow Me. For the default 24-segment path you would rotate the shape or path 7.5°.

If I was drawing a leg to use in a project, I would rotate the path and then make a quarter circle arc for the path.

 

[SketchUp Guru]

As if you aren't already bored to tears with this, I'm going to drag it out a little more.

I was thinking about tnimble's version of the model which is a good approach for keeping file size manageable. I took that a bit further with the following. I have four components in the model as shown. The square portions are left as separate from the turned parts and only the turned parts are quartered. There are four instances of each of the turned quarter component. The reason I did it this way is that joinery can be added to the square portions if desired.

If I had made the whole leg quarter as did tnimble, editing one face to add a mortise would result in a mortise in each face. Making the quarter that gets the mortise unique would result in a greatly increased file size. As show, the file size is down to just under 300 Mb from the 1Mb+ of the original version of the leg. I didn't do anything to simplifu the curves prior to making this so it is done to the original DXF file as before.

One important not. As I mentioned in my response to tnimble, I rotated the path circle 7.5° before cutting away all but a 90° arc. The circle was then divided at the midpoints of the two edges at the ends of the remaining arc. This puts a seam line on a face which can be hidden without showing. With the seam line on and edge between two faces, the line cannot really be hidden so you have a sort of shadow line created.

Hope that makes sense.

 

[LarryS.]

Dave,

I had to stop reading halfway down as I ran out of brain !!

excellent info as ever



paul