Hi guys,
I am wanting to cut these 7000 holes into this face for a perforated piece of steel… Is there a way I can do this? The file seems to not even create faces on the holes. I hope this makes sense!
Original file was a STEP which was converted into a DXF to import into Sketchup.
Thanks guys
Is it a fat surface that’s getting the holes? Do they have to be actual holes or could a texture work?
yes its flat. Ideally holes, yes
Thanks
OK. actual holes will wind up creating a lot of geometry that will cause your computer to struggle. Are the holes distributed in a regular pattern? How big are the holes and how big is the panel?
Yes, however when I import this via a Solidworks file (because it needed to be converted from step. to a workable Sketchup file), it seems to work fine yet some of the panels come with missing geometry. I’ll upload to show you what I mean. Transfer - Dropbox
Part of the problem with the import is that faces are triangulated which adds a huge number of edges to the file which will slow things down. You can see that triangulation here.
The large object with no faces contains over 751 thousand edges. If you were to create a face with all those holes and then extrude that to 3D, you would quadruple the number of edges and add more than 751,000 faces.
Currently your model has over 1.5 million edges. This is making it very sluggish. You wouldn’t really be able to add anything to flesh out the project. A texture would make the file much easier to work with. More in a moment.
Hi using these panels flat would be fine for what we need… Thanks for this. If only we could import STEP files.
There are importers for STEP files but they won’t help with the geometry. I think it would make more sense to create textures for these panels if you have to show the holes. I think it would also make sense to divide the larger panels into smaller units to use for creating the textures.
Here I’ve made a quick material from that one panel. It could be made any color, the holes are transparent and it won’t load up a model.
Panel for Ashlee.skp (1.3 MB)
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Oh my gosh Dave I understand what you mean about making this a material now. I feel so silly it’s like I completely forgot that transparent material even existed. How did you end up cutting the holes in to make the circles an individual face?
Thank you so much, love the train haha
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Click in sequence on the scenes tabs of this SU file for ideas.
Array of holes.skp (369.0 KB)
I didn’t actually cut the holes. I set up a view in SketchUp of the the “panel” like this:
I exported it as a .png file and in options I set a larger size and ticked the box to make the background transparent.
I opened the file in an image editor and applied the gray to what would be the face leaving everything else transparent. I also cropped the image tight to the outline, well, as close as you can get with a rectangle. This was saved as a png file and imported as a texture into SketchUp.
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Hey thank you so much! I will have a play around wit this. Thank you Dave, you’re great
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Thank you Jean!
BTW, one thing I learned doing this is that the transparency holes don’t cast shadows with SU’s shadow casting. They can with V-Ray, and I found from the back side looking at a backlit screen like this, I needed a mirror image of the texture applied to the backside as well.
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On second glance, I see this: I opened the file done last fall in SU2022 on an Intel Mac in SU2024 on my new M1 Max Mac, and at first it looks like I remember - the whole perforated sheet casts a shadow that’s solid, but do anything to re-render the shadow and now the whole perforated sheet casts a shadow that is totally transparent. Must be the new graphics engine. Either way, you don’t get a dappled shadow pattern from the holes.
On opening
On redraw
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You’re welcome.
Please notice that this method is good if you need a reasonable number of holes. Otherwise you can easily get a huge number of geometries.
You can minimize the problem by using a low segmentation for the holes and using real holes only in locations that have an impact on the view that you want to get.
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I’ve found that a vector editor like adobe illustrator can be very useful for generating this kind of png for use in SketchUp.