Gearing Up with Sketchup

The cat meowing confused my dogs.

Just on the question of selecting the outside lines and then doing a right-click erase, look at your own video. The right-click itself has the effect of deselecting the edges you carefully selected, and it selects the face, which is what then gets erased. You need not have selected the edges.

I just did a quick scan back in this topic and (please forgive me if I’m wrong) you have never shared a sample file that we can examine to understand where you are going astray. We try to give clear directions but you repeatedly run into problems anyway. There’s a communication breakdown between here and there, and I don’t know how to bridge it…

SUCCESS!!!

THANK YOU EVERYBODY !!!

You have all been exceedingly generous with your time (and probably had a few chuckles along the way but I don’t mind)…
But back to the title of this thread and a whole new can of worms if you don’t mind…
Where do I get the Gears plug-in and how do I install it?

Just on the question of selecting the outside lines and then doing a right-click erase,
Thought it was necessary in order to define the area to be highlighted (the face).

Did my suggestion work?
I think 1. You deleted the edges of the rectangle
2. You mixed raw geometry with components

Like a Champ!!! I thought they were combining the rectangle sides into an entity and never realized all the were doing was highlighting all “boxed” components.
Thank you!

Either the whole thing needs to be a component or raw geometry you cannot mix. Also you deleted the edges of the rectangle not the face.
I suggest you look at a few basic tutorials if you are to continue with sketchup it will help grasp the concepts a bit better. (Especially component)
I’m glad you got it sorted
I will now sleep its 1 am!

ThorleyianSketchUpper
15h

“Also you deleted the edges of the rectangle not the face”.
but the face is what erased when I did that and the green background was shown through the rectangular hole. Visually… how am I supposed to know the difference?
The good news - and to everyone’s relief… SketchUp For Dummies arrives tomorrow.

ThorleyianSketchUpper
15h
Confused

  1. You mixed raw geometry with components

Since everything in SketchUp consists of linear faces - no true curves - isn’t it raw geometry that defines and is needed to draw all of it, and wouldn’t that in and of itself mandate that it be part of a component? Where is the breakpoint between large raw geometry that you seem to have referred to, and the minute raw geometry?

This statement lives up to your username! Hopefully a bit of reading the “for Dummies” book (which I bought years ago and learned a lot from it) will clarify things for you.

In a nutshell, yes, all basic geometry in SketchUp is composed of finite straight edges and finite planar faces bounded by edges. But by design, these entities “stick to” each other wherever they touch, making the notion of a “thing” or “object” awkward. Groups and Components exist to create isolated “contexts” in which a collection of edges and faces interact only with each other and can not stick to anything outside the context.

So, you can draw a face inside a Component and then draw a second face in the identical place outside the Component and they will not merge or stick together. But you will see “z-fighting” visual effects indicating that they share the same place in space, and you can indeed get confused about which one you are seeing and manipulating because it depends on whether the Component is open for edit or not.

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As I mentioned, look at your own video. When you right-clicked on the face inside the selected rectangle edges, that action deselected the edges and selected the face. So, it wasn’t the edges that were selected at the time you did the Erase.

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By raw geometry I mean not a component.
You made a component of the rectangle and then tried to make this behave together with the " raw geometry/face" of the circle.
That is why it messed up and my suggestions worked when you left it all as raw geometry.

As for the deleting edges instead of face, you deleted the edges and the face but somehow edges still remained on the circle. I’m not going to explain this other than
“if you want to delete the face, delete the face not the edges”

I’m starting to confuse myself at this point! Although my concept must be correct as it worked.

Like I say, do some research and just watch some basic vids on components, faces etc.
Read the book you ordered, honestly, randomly guessing will only leave you frustrated.

People on here are very good at helping, but would much prefer you have a basic understanding of what is going on.

I have tried several times to be clear about this now, but you need to walk a little before you can run.

Best of luck

I have no idea what you mean by z-fighting. Nothing is blurred nothing is jumping around. everything is crystal clear… running a GTX1070 processor if that means anything with respect to this. When exactly… or maybe I should be asking during what view transition or tool movement transition would this visual indicator effect appear? The only time I’ve ever seen any jumping around of anything is when the cursor for the tape measure tool would not immediately lock on an already established guide point when I was near it, and when the protractor would not fix to the axial plane I wanted at the red/green/blue origin point. Can you provide a few sequential steps for me to perform to see the effect you describe?

Ok yes @colin is right by how the face got deleted.

By Accident
You intended to delete the edges.(wrong)

How I recommend deleting a face again:

With select tool, select the face
Press the delete key

Thank you. I thought you meant the raw geometry of the rectangle combined with the face of the rectangle and from my perspective to erase the face , it was needed to define the face of the rectangle. Thanks for clearing it up. much appreciated.

“Z-fighting” is an OpenGL visual effect that occurs when two faces with different materials occupy the same place. It is the way the OpenGL display system handles the ambiguity about which of the two materials should be displayed. Here’s an animation that illustrates it. What happens is:

  • I create a rectangle.
  • I paint that rectangle with a red material
  • I create a component from the rectangle
  • I create a second rectangle atop the first one (that is now inside the component, so they don’t interact). It has the default material, which in my setup has a bright green color.
  • When I orbit around the model you see flashing interactions between the two colors.

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Confused:

The reason I with drew my previous post was the you tube video in your post #32 was not stable. By that I mean some times when viewing that post a different video would display vs the one intended. Other videos on the link play list would run and getting the skectchup disk drawing back was difficult. Today things work as expected so dot … ?
Back to my basic question: What type of gear do you want to draw; secondly how did you establish the disk dia.? In my mind gears usually operate in pairs and depending on the approach there needs to be space for the interfaceing one in your drawing for " reasonable" tangent points but, when one creates the holes as shown their sides are not parallel.
I did notice when the radial array is done you use the mid point of the hole length. so, think you recognize that is a problem?? I was thinking maybe bevel gear but, have not looked at approach.
What am I missing???

I only found one plugin, none in the extension ware house.
It was the sketchucation forum, Index page • sketchUcation •.
It will be in the plugin store but, you will have to register first. Down load it and then use the SU extension manager to install. It will ask some questions and you will have to input some design info.
IMHO you may be better laying out the gear in 2d, then use push pull to extrude tooth profile to the desired model length, then make it a component and then do you radial array. Once you have the drawing and what to print there are commercial printers listed( three ) in some of the forums that for free check your model for acceptably for printing.
I’ll have to check to see if info in your post is enough to layout tooth.
As minimum you will have to decide what type of print material you want.
I would think BOX can.

He has gone onto another thread, and has got the plugin I think

You can follow it here if you wish

Hi folks.

Click in sequence on the scenes tabs of this SU file for ideas.

Regards.

Jean

Circular array of holes in thick plate.skp (95.8 KB)