Building/intersecting layers/components without losing geometry

Beginner learning. I want to learn to draw the intersecting cardboard to separate bottles, half cutout up, and half cutout down. I create an UP element, make it a component and replicate it. Create a DOWN component and replicate it. Made them each Layers so I can turn them on and off while viewing, and then put them together, but each time I lose parts of one or the other, and if I try to build one component on the other I always end up with lines being “on an edge of a hidden component” or such like. Please help.

Could you share your SKP file? Otherwise we have to guess.

My guess would be that you are not keeping all your geometry on Layer0, which should (with very rare exceptions which don’t apply here) ALWAYS, ALWAYS be set as the default layer (its radio button on the left in the Layers window should be checked).

Only assign non-drfault layers to top level components.

If this is the issue, or part of it, to fix it, open each of your components for editing, select all, and assign Layer0 to all the geometry and any sub components.

I’m deliberately moving the components to different layers so I can turn them on/off. They display fine when all displayed, but as you will see in the skp file, where two components/layers intersect part of one has disappeared making the other minus edges or hollow.
Bench V2.skp (317.4 KB)

Incorrect use of SketchUp’s layer system is a sure path to modeling mayhem.
See these training videos:



It’s no problem to move components to different layers, but their geometry must stay on Layer0.

Your ‘Torsion box base’ is a made as a component, but you didn’t check ‘Replace selection with component’ when you made it. It remains all loose geometry, with different parts of the geometry on different layers. Make each piece of the geometry into a component, with its geometry on Layer0, THEN assign your layers to the COMPONENTS in the torsion box.

And correct the reverse faces (showing blue) so SU will recognise the ‘inside’ of each component.

I’ve tried to clean it up some.

I’ve selected one face of each of your ‘pieces’ and used PushPull to give it thickness, then made it into a component in the SU sense, changed all the geometry onto Layer0 and put the components onto the layers you wanted to turn on/off separately.

Making components like this also highlighted a few oddities in your drawing.

The long verticals in your torsion box don’t have the holes exactly the same height, nor are they symmetrically placed. I’ve edited that to make it so, though you might have done that deliberately.


Bench V3.skp (156.7 KB)

PS. File amended - all your dimensions but one were hidden. I’ve unhidden them, and put them on the Dimensions layer.

Thanks John, I’ll look at it and try to understand.

Thanks Geo.

Thanks John and Geo - design completed successfully. Attached in case anyone is interested.Bench V2.skp (423.0 KB)

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@russell.neilsen thanks for sharing your model I think it’s a good way others like me can learn.
I see you make almost everything as a component, that’s good (better than I do).
I’m nobody to talk about what is right and what is wrong, I tell what I’d like people to tell me.

If you change the color for back faces in Styles > Edit > Face settings you will notice some of them are reverse. You can all of them and then right clic reverse face, I think you can also automaticaly fix it with the extension Solid Inspector²

Once it’s finished you can place it at the origin, you can cut the whole model and paste it like this.

question

Thank you again :wink:

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