I’m new to Sketch-up and have been trying to follow the tutorials in order to create a particular object, but I am stuck! This is the object I am trying to create:
All the construction lines are where I want them. The only problem is trying to ‘close’ the figure at the bottom. What I want to end up with is a cylinder externally with a hole in the middle that starts as a straight cylinder, then tapers to a smaller diameter at the bottom. But I can’t see how to close the figure at the bottom.
As @Wo3Dan illustrates, whenever a shape has rotational symmetry your first thought should be to draw a cross section and “lathe” it using the followme tool. Since you bring this up in the 3D printing section, one additional thing to be wary of is that if your part is small SketchUp may fail to create small edges or faces, leaving gaps. The workaround is to scale the part up by a factor of 10, 100, or even 1000 as needed, perform the followme, and then scale it back to the real size. If the part is a component, you can make another instance using move-copy, scale that copy, do the operation on it, and then simply delete the copy. The original will get the properly scaled changes.
Another simple method is to pull up a ring shaped face to height.
Then pull up the center face (inside the ring) ~half way to desired height.
Scale the bottom center circle. See:
