Thanks again. I’m very curious to see which edges are off. And then I have to figure out why since, as I mentioned, they were set to zero base and height when I drew them in CAD.
How can I determine the Zs myself so I don’t have to take up forum resources, i.e. you!
And, yes, I suspected as much about the layers. I’ve been thinking of them in terms of the way I use them in CAD, but haven’t had time to really learn about them in SketchUp. I also have access to the Lynda.com tutorials and have been meaning to study those. For this drawing I’m going to need to set them up so that I can view alternatives, i.e. turning options on and off – presumably through layers. So I’ve been attempting to put the imported CAD base on one layer, the buildings that are consistent through the alternatives on another layer, and then the alternatives each on their own layers. But I know I’ve started off on the wrong foot. I’ll work on that next after I figure out the Z problem. Given these early layer issues, I’m going to want to figure out how to move elements to different layers to correct my initial mistakes.
Sorry for the delay - very busy day and now its almost bedtime. Try orbiting around your model and zooming in on anything that looks a bit strange, as in the attached animation. There are numerous places where the edges don’t quite line up or aren’t quite level. When you find such, you can use the move tool to fix them. Activate the tool, click on an end of an edge that is off plane, wiggle a bit, and then let go of the mouse and type [,0] + enter. That tells the tool to move the vertex to z=0 without changing the x or y coordinates.
After a night to sleep on it, it occured to me that it would be easier to fix these problems immediately after importing the dwg, before you pushpull or otherwise add to the drawing. The 3D parts you have created make it more difficult to find the defects. There are plugins such as TIG’s Flatten to Plane that project geometry onto a plane that you could apply to make sure all is well before starting to edit in SketchUp.
Install this extension which provides the Query tool: Utilities Tools — Extension Warehouse
Working with the model you shared, I find the vertices of all the imported 2D plans are perfectly coplanar.
Confirmed by exporting the vertices to a CSV file. All Z coordinates are 0 94 DeKalb-5_verts.txt (8.4 KB)
SketchUp Layers control visibility … nothing more.
Groups and Components are the means to isolate geometry in SketchUp.
Groups and Components may be assigned to a Layer other than the Default Layer0
However, it’s the Group or Component that bears the Layer atribute.
The raw geometry within a Group or Component must always remain assigned to the Default Layer0
Simply delete the layers and reasign all entities back to the Default Layer0 via the Layers manager.
Here’s an animation that shows what I think are the problem edges. It flashes between all visible and just the problem set visible. There are more edges in the problem set than it might appear. In several places there are more than one that are visually right atop each other but actually are subtly different. Such almost coincident edges can cause problems when you try to edit a model because you aren’t sure which one the inference engine picked.
Thanks, guys, for your numerous and in-depth responses. For some reason, I didn’t get notifications of them so I just checked in to the thread and saw your replies. I’m going to try wade through them in the next few days. I have a suspicion, though, that I need to start afresh with a newly imported base from my CAD program. Much as I dread that, it may be simpler than finding and fixing the problems in the current file.
I just tried to install Flatten to Plane and I think now it’s the cause of these errors upon starting SU (This probably belongs in a different thread.)makefacesrb fail.pdf (63.9 KB)
Those errors are reported in makefaces.rb which is not part of TIG’s flatten to plane. It appears there is some sort of interference taking place between the plugins you have installed. Yes, that would belong in a new topic.
