Followme tool confusion

Hi new SketchUp user here-

Question when using the followme tool.

First I draw a circle. Next I draw a straight line from the center of the circle and end 2" to the outside of the circle.
When I do this the circle breaks the line into segments. What am I doing wrong.

Many thanks!
Mark Williams

Good question. It might be easier to figure it out if you could share the SKP file with us.

What does this have to do with Follow Me.

Follow me does explode curves/arcs on profiles when it is run but it doesn’t sound like you’ve got to that point yet.

What are you trying to create?

This is only my 3 day working with SketchUp.
I’m just trying to familiarize myself with the tools and their functions.

I can draw a straight line for the path. Next I draw a circle starting at one of the end points of the path.
If I select my arrow tool and click where the line path crosses the circle path the line is broken. Almost like the circle cut the line path.

That is correct. Any time a non-grouped line crosses another, then lines break at the intersection.

So then should I group the line after I draw it and before drawing the circle?

I will echo Chris at this point and say that it really depends on what you are trying to do. The default behavior of SketchUp is to break at intersections, so it is just how it behaves. If there was a reason that you wanted to prevent the intersection, then, yes, you could group before drawing overlapping geometry.

This is the tutorial I’m watching. The instructor draws a curved line. Next he draws a circle that overlaps his line.
When he clicks on his line it is not broken where the circle crosses the line. When I perform the same process my line is broken.

That’s actually a poor way to set up to make the pipe. You see how he drew a circle and ended up with a pipe with an elliptical cross section. He should have placed the circle perpendicular to the end of the arc (not line).

What is the radius of your circle? If it is very tiny, it might get exploded. I’ve seen that happen on occasion.

By the way, if you group the circle, you’ll need to put the arcs inside the group for Follow Me to work so in this case, it isn’t really worth grouping.

Probably best if you upload a screenshot or a skp file or something… it’s hard to think what you might be looking at without actually looking at it.

I’ll try to upload an image this evening. I’m actually working on both a mac and pc.

I think the video is misleading in the sense that it doesn’t clearly show that the circle created is perpendicular to the path. It sounds like you are creating your circle on top of the path and that’s what’s breaking it into segments. In the video below, I deliberately started the path with a short line just to make it easier to create a circle at the end that is perpendicular to the path (note the cyan color when creating an arc … this indicates that it is tangent to the previous edge). I also triple-clicked the arcs to automatically select all joined edges.

The video you were looking at didnt really explain how the FollowMe tool works which is very important.

Check out these videos. They explain how FollowMe works a bit better

Cheers
CD

That video is misleading because the circle was not created perpendicular to the path. It was created laying on the same plane as the arcs. The clear evidence is in the fact that the resulting pipe does not have a circular section at the end.

In Jim’s example, the pipe does have a circular cross section because the first segment of the path and the profile are perpendicular to each other.

Stay with the SketchUp Video Tutorials produced by the SketchUp folks.

Follow Me Tool

To clarify, the video in question creates a vertical circle not in the plane of the arcs. However, it is in the X/Z plane and is not perpendicular to the path (hence the oval cross-section).

This is how it’s created:

However, this makes it look like it’s flat, when it’s not:

I think the OP had created something like this by following the video:

That would not produce a very useful pipe…

2 Likes

Thanks for everyone’s help explaining how to properly use the followme tool.
I think I’m rollin.

Mark

1 Like

One question: What view do yo guys use. I’m using the ISO view. When I draw my circles but they appear as ellipses.

Your circles look like ellipses because they are drawn onto a plane that isn’t perpendicular to the direction the camera is looking. A circle foreshortens to an ellipse when you look at it from an angle. But it is really a circle.

In SketchUp if there isn’t an existing face at the location where you place a circle’s center, the circle is drawn on whatever cardinal plane is closest to perpendicular to the current camera look direction. In iso view, this is the red-green plane. To draw on other cardinal planes you can orbit until you are looking nearly square-on at the desired plane before drawing the circle. In perspective projection there is also a trick you can use: if you move the cursor up near the blue axis at the top of the view, the circle will snap to either the red or green orientation as you move the cursor side to side. You can lock the orientation by pressing and holding the shift key and then move the cursor to place the circle’s center at any desired point. Similarly, if there is any face oriented the same way you want your circle to be, you can move the cursor over that face and press+hold shift to lock the circle to that orientation.