So I have traced out a site plan and started creating all the terrain. I used Radial Bending to get the general terrain of a hill in which a road passes through it. I noticed as I was moving through the drawing a part of the curb that I originally traced was missing. You can see in the image I have the top part already extruded and the lower portion is ready to extrude but I can’t seem to close the geometry for the middle section right on the bend. I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how to close it?
Hey Eric I tried the Follow Me Tool with no luck. I will try the vector push pull. I think it might be impossible because I have a feeling it wont follow the contour of the curve.I tried drawing in the line in between to try and close the geometry but I created a soap skin on the grass which makes connecting it hard.
Can you share the model? Or at least that portion of the site? I think this may be one of those cases where re-building it may be better than trying to keep pushing it to work. I’m happy to take a quick look and confirm.
Ok, get ready for my long-winded explanation. Firstly, make sure to take some time to check out out Fundamentals courses on SketchUp Campus. I recommend reviewing how groups and tags work together. Make sure never to change your active drawing tag to anything other than ‘untagged’ and make sure that everything is grouped separately…for example curbs sit on the terrain surface so a terrain group and a curbs group is a good place to start.
With that out of the way, to your question:
It’s hard to see black lines with black faces (ie your road) so I changed the lines to pink for this demo so I can see what I’m doing better.
Then I grouped the road that needs the curb separate so I can more easily isolate just that problem edge from the other parts of the model.
I made a copy of that group along the blue axis so I’m working directly above the site. It’s good to work above a terrain group so that you can either drape or drop geometry below as needed.
I used FollowMe but as you might expect, the curb tilts in response to the sloped curves so while looking good from afar, it’s not really accurate to how curbs are built.
Thank you very much Eric with the detailed response. I am going to give it a try. When you used the Follow Me and Keep tool did you just draw a square at the start of the line segment and just drag it to the end?
No. I just grabbed the end face of the curb that you had already there at the start of the driveway
Here it is isolated if it helps: CurbExercise.skp (2.2 MB)
I have one more question for you if you don’t mind answering it. Next time when I create a site design all my line work and surfaces should live on layer zero until i am done outlining everything. Correct?
Also should I create all my group/layers while they are all still on the zero plane (not extruded) or should i create the groups as i start extruding each object? Let me know which one do you think is better.
Thanks for the videos I watched most of them today.
Hi @andy. Sorry I missed this message. Try using the ‘@’ then my name and it’ll ping me next time.
Yes. All raw geometry needs to be on layer 0 or ‘untagged’. Once you’re ready to make it a group or component you can and should assign it to a layer/tag.
This is up to you. It depends on the project. For instance…if everything is grouped, you can safely draw and extrude loose geometry without fear of it ‘sticking’ to something else. If the opposite is true and your ground plane is loose geometry then it may be easier to group an object prior to extruding. I typically group first for site design and group second if working on an isolated object off to the side, like a bollard or bench that I’ll place after creating. Hope this helps some.
