Cleaning up a sketchup model

SketchUp
1

Hello everyone!

First of all i have to say love the community here, I always come to this site when I’m using sketchup and I get stuck, very helpful indeed!

I have encountered and issue that I can’t really find a solution to:

I’m currently working on 3D interior model of an apartment. I’ve gone out and taken all the measurements myself (with a laser meter thank goodness) and have input them into sketchup.

The model is essentially complete, but the way that I’ve created it there are a lot of overlapping lines and groups. This is because I need to be able to “show” and “hide” these different groups as the owners want to see what it were to look like if they decide to knock down certain walls.

The downside is that I get loads of unwanted visible lines here and there.

So my question is: How do I make my model clean and easy to look like, while retaining the “manoeuvrability” that I’ve created?

I’ve uploaded an image so you can see what I mean.

Thanks in advance and hope to hear from you.
P.

2

Would this solve your issue? (I’m not 100% I fully understood, but…)

3

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately that’s now what I mean.

I’m trying to make the final model look as clean as possible, while retaining this edge style.

I’d like the groups to merge/integrate seamlessly.

I hope this makes more sense.

4

Here’s another pic to show you what I mean

5

I use layers; copy a full set of walls onto a new layer and delete the ones not relevant to that layer.

  • open the layers window add new and call it “Option 1” or whatever
  • Select all the walls and cut them
  • Make Option 1 the active layer (little round dot beside it)
  • Paste the walls (this should put them all on the currently active layer)
  • Delete all the walls that are not relevant to option 1
  • Create a new layer called “Option 2”
  • Make this the current layer
  • Hide the layer called “Option 1” (the tic box) ← important to avoid confusion.
  • Paste and do the same thing on this layer

After all the options are done, I would hide all the options and paste again to layer 0 - then delete everything except the common walls. You may end up with some walls duplicated on different layers, but it’s much more manageable.

Note when working with layers:
Best practice is to draw everything on Layer 0, then group together geometry that you want on another layer and use the entity info window to assign this group to another layer.

6

You can hide the unwanted edges. I’ve used this technique in this model for example: http://blog.cotty.de/2015/04/pfosten/

7

Point to keep in mind, layers does not isolate geometry. That is done by use of components and groups, You would probably want to also use scenes.
Attached is a tutorial from some time ago( By Gully I think ) showing a model approach and how to avoid the lines some times showing upupstairs_downstairs2.skp (210.1 KB) , not exact meeting your case but gives ideas.