Recently started on SketchUp Web to design guitars in 3D, and it was a fairly simple learning curve, but since upgrading to Pro about a week ago, I’m having a devil of a time doing things that came naturally in the Web version, like having the faces become solid when joined. I have no doubt that it’s something so simple that I’m overlooking, but I’ve gone through every pulldown menu and still can’t seem to get the faces to appear solid so that I can use the Push/Pull or FollowMe commands to get to 3D. As you can see, a few of the faces did, in fact, become solid, but not the rest. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and explain it like I’m a five year old if you must. I won’t get offended. Thanks in advance.
6 string single cut bass build.skp (91.7 KB)
I haven’t found the cause, but indeed SketchUp failed to create faces for many of your areas. You can repair it by tracing over an edge using the line tool. To set up the animation below, I first edited the style to have a pale yellow background color because that makes it obvious where faces do or do not exist. Then I trace edges and you can see that faces are formed. Note that there are some reversed faces at the top of the neck (gray-blue color) and these affect the adjacent face when it fills in.
I thought of retracing things to ensure that it completely closes, but I was worried that I’d somehow have to do it for the curves too, which were a pain in the behind. That’s a huge help. Thank you so much for your time.
How did you draw the thing to start with?
One thing I would suggest is model the overall guitar body and make it 3D before you start adding the front details. Same with the neck. I would make the separate parts of the guitar as components or groups.
I would also suggest modeling with the camera set to Perspective. Save Parallel Projection if you need to export images or create patterns, etc.
So now I’m having trouble making this very curved guitar headstock a solid shape so that I can trim it down at the angle that you can see I’ve tried to shape it to. The curves don’t seem to be selectable or recognized.
6 string single cut bass build.skp (132.7 KB)
You are making this too hard for yourself. You need to study some more SketchUp basics, in particular about using groups and components. If you group the basic headstock and then make a cutter for the parts you want to remove, solid tools will easily trim away the excess. It may be necessary to use “the Dave Method” (search the forum for lots of discussion) to avoid creating very short edges that will lead SketchUp to delete them and leave gaps or missing faces.
Select just this face of the head of the guitar, and make it a component.
Select everything else, and make that a component too.
Then select all, and reverse faces, to get white faces outside, where they should be.
Delete the rest of the ‘head’ parts, to leave just the component face.
Delete everything in your ‘cutter’ area except this top face:
Open the ‘head’ component for editing, and pushpull it past the neck of the guitar.
Close the head component.
Push pull the top face of the ‘cutter’ part down below the head, and window select round it.
R-click, and select Intersect faces/With model, to create the sloping faces you want for the head component.
Close the main component, open the head component, and select it all.
R-click and Intersect faces/With model again, to create the cuts round the edges of the head.
Trim off the excess in the head. Use a R-L selection, and erase what is selected.
Repeat for the right side.
That should have created faces in the ‘cutter’ block in the profile of the head, but the edges have gaps in the top portion.
But it has done on the other side. Double click that face to select both the face and its edges.
Select that face, and cut to clipboard.
Trim off the rest of the cutter block and open the head for editing.
Edit/Paste in place the face from the clipboard. Double click it to select the face and its edges.
Move/Copy that face to the other side an d reverse it, then ‘stitch’ across the ends from endpoint to endpoint to fill in the missing edges and create the whole surface round the ends of the head.
I’ve only done part of it. But here’s the result
6 string single cut bass build JWM.skp (236.0 KB)
As DaveR suggested earlier, make more components of parts of your guitar, to keep the geometry separate. It makes editing MUCH easier.