I learned to cut holes on curved objects from this video: Cutting a hole in a curved surface or wall in Sketchup - YouTube
But it turned out to be a messy process on my object. After I use right click->Intersect faces->with selection, I ended up with many gaps, missing faces on my object as shown in the screen capture. I spent great efforts to clean it up on the two holes at the bottom. They still look not clean. Is there a better way to do it? Does it have to be this messy?
Try scaling the object up by a factor of 100. You are running into the small face limitation of Sketchup. Once your finished editing, scale back to normal size.
Shep
You are running SketchUp Pro ?
Pro has Solid Tools built-in.
Toolbar: View > Toolbars… check Solid Tools
Menu: Tools > Solid Tools (about half way down.)
Shep,
Scaling up my model almost solved my problem. I can cut cleanly with a 100x scaled up model. But when I scaled it back down, sketchup gave me this message:
I don’t see anything wrong. But after I hit yes, hell broke loose and I got this.
What was sketchup trying to fix? What it messed up my model?
Attached is my scaled up model.
Fixed bar9-3.skp (1.2 MB)
Yes, I have Pro. But I haven’t tried those solid tools.
Thanks for you help.
The “Don’t panic” message showed up when I tried to save my model BTW.
You could try scaling up a bit larger. Also another technique is to make the object a component, copy it, and scale up the copy. You then do the editing on the “proxy” copy. When finished, just delete the over sized copy.
As for that message, I personally don’t like to let sketchup do the fixing for me. It seems SU can sometimes make thing worse when it “fixes” things after an intersection or other operation.
In any case, your final model makes a solid group, so that good.
Finally, as Dan suggests, try solid tools. They can save some cleanup after intersecting and so on.
Shep
@Shep, @san0wong & @DanRathbun, the nature of the problem is something that can’t simply be solved by scaling up > ’ editing / modeling operations > scaling down, neither by using the solid tools at some point, just to get a model with hidden lines running past new endpoints (due to intersection) very close to these hidden lines.
In general: an endpoint cannot be positioned or created near an edge (in the same editing context!) without splitting up that edge into two, dragging it towards the endpoint.
This is what happens while performing the intersection here.
Near means less than say 0.01" (I keep forgetting the exact distance)
You might get a nice looking smooth model but there will be some unexpected triangulation underneath which showes with ‘Hidden Geometry’ on.
Edit: Near means equal or less than 0.001" or 0.0254mm