Contemplating…Why can I not push/pull a curved or smoothed surface?
It seems like this should be technically possible.
The faces havent moved or changed, even though their bounding edges are smoothed.
I guess somebody with lots of free time (and no desire to use that for commerical gain) could write an extension to do this.
There are extensions that do this, but the basic reason is they are all separate faces at slightly different angles.
I guess by definition you push pull in the direction of a single face normal, but this is not a single face anymore.
So which direction do you pull in?
Show the hidden lines, and you might understand why it is not that easy to pushpull all those faces.
As @Box said, there are extensions that can do the trick, like the payed extension Joined Push Pull Interactive by Fredo6
The problem is that a perfect push pull of a surface, should account for the normal of every face and the intersection of the resulting face and the adjoining resulting faces. Besides that it should consider that some of the new faces will not intersect any other face on tight inward angles or might have to expand almost endlessly to intersect other faces on tight outward angles. The problem is geometrically complex and Joint Push Pull solves it by offseting faces with some kind of average calculation and even so it will fail sometimes.
There are also a lot of options like offseting should extrude the surfaces always on a normal but should the outline follow adjoining faces, like extruding the roof of a house should extrude it along the wall faces or should it always extrude perpendicularly from roof surface.
The problem is not easy to solve and JPP has a lot of options that try to solve each of these problems but not a single solution to solve it all.
Great thanks for the response…
Joint Push Pull is the extension.. Fred has solved it!
I so often find myself having to unsoften, or to reveal hidden edges in order to pushpull a face (perpendicular from other, softened faces) that I hotkey ~ to toggle “show hidden geometry”
JPP will be very helpful - I always figured it was just for pushpulling multiple faces at the same time (also useful, but different purpose to mine)
Soften / Smooth is a strange concept since it doesnt actually smooth anything; it identifies which edges are the subject of a graphical trick.
Moving forward to PBL materials and better rendering capabilities, I wonder if the smooth process will become much improved.
It’s not bad now, but in the near future I imagine it could replace the need to do the destructive SubD smoothing, bevels/chamfers, etc.
I cant imagine SketchUp withou Soften/Smooth edges though..its so ubiquitous in the SKP world and helps to define the ‘character’ of sketchup outputs.
BTW, Joint Push Pull will make flat faces with hidden geometry that won’t push pull with the native tool. Turn on hidden geometry and you can erase them if the faces are coplanar. I’ve learned to look for this now when I use it. A thickened box:
Please, update your profile.
The current version of SketchUp is not precise enough if you need help that needs to be fine tuned for a specific version.
Replace that by the real version number like 2024 or 2025 or whatever you are using.
