Thank you. I erased the wireframe model and came to the same conclusion.
Interestingly (and annoyingly) I was able to extend the deck some but found
it was colliding with the girders. Turns out I drew multiple lines along
the top edges of said girders and so it followed the wrong one! Gah.
Some progress on the topdeck using the FollowMe tool:
Wonder why it keeps alternating shades like that…
I assume the light shade is default material “front” and the dark is “back”. What is probably happening is that SketchUp is assuming a face orientation based on the starting profile you use each time. If it is the end of the previous section, this is causing them to alternate which way the front vs back surfaces go. You should reverse the faces on the dark sections.
That’s precisely what I have been doing.
The topdeck rendered…pretty decently! A few breaks and cracks when it changes direction (the bridge is curved in a few places), but I’m able to rectify this manually using the line tool.
I’ll post again when I get the entire topdeck ironed out.
Thanks for the assistance so far.
Topdeck is finished up!
No vehicles yet please, the concrete is still drying…
Now, I need to place the top sides of the drains and then the asphalt…was wondering how to paint the lines on asphalt actually, should I just make them ultra long rectangles using Follow Me, or is there a better way?
Maybe create a texture with the black asphalt and lines and then apply it to the roadbed faces?
Sadly, I don’t know how on earth to create textures. Is that in the help files?
Definitely in SketchUp help. You might start here:
What I’m reading sounds very complex and confusing, I dunno if I am able to follow through.
I’ll try to extrude the lines 3 dimensionally parallel with the asphalt itself. If that fails then I’ll try this texturing madness…
Well I skipped over the extrusion process of the asphalt and instead opted to “optimise” the model by removing the extraeneous lines that appear in the changes to the bridge’s horizontal plane.
I then proceeded to attempt to build one of the bridge’s handrailing brackets.
This took me some 10 hours to do!
And for some stupid reason half of the faces on the bridge have reversed themselves for no apparent reason.
As it is absolutely positively impossible, I have abandoned this project.
I’m sure it isn’t impossible but maybe you could find something else to work on for awhile and come back to this some day in the future.
Jesus.
I now have faces on the bridge deck that randomly “flicker” and ignore my paint commands.
What the hell?
If you lay one face directly on top of another so that they occupy the same plane, the faces fight with each other for visibility: neither is in front and neither is behind. This is called “z-fighting.” Depending on the circumstances, either remove one of the faces, inset one into the other, or separate the faces by some space. Also, you can use a self-cutting component to automatically cut an opening in the face it sits on.
We’d need some detail about your particular situation to advise one versus another of these techniques.
-Gully
Hi Gully.
Okay here’s a screengrab, I managed to eradicate most of the issue by drawing lines, deleting, deleting said lines, and some other finaggaling. It seems mostly alright, but I have a couple of these:
Last night everything was going along fine; I load it today and half the bridge faces are reversed with a bunch of segments “fighting” like you said.
It’s like as soon as I went home the bridge components came to light and had a rave party or something, and I came back the next morning to find the aftermath.
Not sure what I’m looking at. I don’t see the shimmery, flickery z-fighting effect.
-Gully
I’m wondering if when you saved and quit, SU may have auto fixed some issues in your model. Under Preferences, do you have automatically fix problems checked? This doesn’t help fix what you are seeing but may explain what happened and when.
Shep
I just had a look, and I do not have “Automatically fix problems when they are found” checked.
It is a mystery.
Gully, see that dark strip there? It’s attached to the face to the right of it; I can’t seperate it to fix it.
Try turning on hidden geometry (View > Hidden Geometry, a toggle). That should allow you to address the thin blue face individually so you can delete it or reverse it.
-Gully
