BillsYoda09.skp (10.2 MB)
I would like to cut Yoda in half at 45 degree angle to reduce overhang when 3D printing as two separate objects that I can glue together after. How is this done? Need a special extension? Any free tool? With all the surfaces this object has it is likely not a simple task?
Considering you haven’t cleaned up the geometry and there’s a lot of it, I would make a group of Yoda and draw a rectangle at the desired angle inside that group Use that with Intersect Faces to create the cut line. Then make a copy of the group and edit each one. Delete everything above the angled face in one and everything below the face in the other. You will probably find Solid Inspector 2 helpful to track down stray edges and clean them up.
How long would it take to clean up all above and below the line considering the model’s complexity? What do you mean the geometry isn’t cleaned up? Inspector tool found no holes.
Use Soften to get rid of most of the edges then slice it.
I always need to deal with complex geometry (mostly stuff imported from Rhino) that has lots of polygons. Recently I took the plunge and bought that Skimp Extensions. Freakin Life-Changer. You can reduce the complexity of that Yoda within like 30 Seconds. (Reducing the geometry, not slicing it. The slicing shown here is pretty nifty - didn’t know it could be done this way - am learning something (old) every day…
Rhino has a capable polygon-reducing command of its own. Whenever I have to get a model from Rhino to SketchUp I convert the thing into meshes and reduce the polycount in Rhino before saving as a SketchUp file. Rhino’s default meshes when saving directly from NURBS to SketchUp are way too dense.
That is true. I kinda like that Skimp thing because I can import a fairly “good”, meaning detailed Model and than fiddle around with how much reducing I need directly in Sketchup. I kinda found the reduced Rhino exports to contain more errors than if I work this way around. But than again - I am really bad at working Rhino… 
I cannot boast about that either. Rhino can probably do much more than I am capable of learning.
Yoda used to be 183K polygons. I reduced it to 30K using MeshLab decimating tool.
What exactly does soften do? It doesn’t modify the model itself? Does it just generalize what is part of the same surface the more it goes up? Can it be undone after cutting?
Right. it only classifies the “combined” faces as a “surface”
Soften is a “visual” tool. It changes how the faces of the mode look in SketchUp. It does not change the geometry.
Can it be undone afterwards to go back to previous view?
You can unsoften the edges if you want to see them all again. Turn on Hidden Geometry in the View menu, select it all and then in the Soften window, slide the slider to the left.
Hidden = not drawn on the display. Nothing else implied
Soft = adjoining faces considered to be parts of a single surface. Also not drawn on the display. Unless view hidden geometry is turned on, clicking anywhere on the surface selects all of its faces.
Smooth = shading is blended smoothly from one adjoining face to the other so there is no evident sharp fold.
Interesting! That’s how I do it and will have to do it again on slicing up some architectural cornices that are too long for my printer.
I have another question. I recently imported a large amount of STL files into SU to check their scale before moving them to my slicer. I know the STLs are solids since they loaded into the slicer (ChiTuBox) perfectly, but when loading into SU, many of the faces were not closed. It was a mess. I set about closing them by hand (hours of work), but realized this is wrong and shouldn’t happen in the first place.
Rich Pioneer Parts.skp (4.8 MB)
That’s not the only thing happening badly with my SU application (SketchUp Make 2017). All of a sudden it won’t import images like JPG or PNG. They’re grayed out in the dialog box. And every time I try to run Podium it crashes immediately. That’s with both Podium V 2.5 and V 2.6.
I’m running a M 2019 MacBook Pro 16". The program was running correctly until it wasn’t so i know that the initial load into the new Mac worked.
Any ideas?
Import at a larger scale.
.stl files have no scale or dimension units. Everything you imported is very tiny.
Import them using Meters instead of inches for the import units and you won’t get the holes.
One thing is for certain. SketchUp 2017 Make hasn’t changed in more than 4 years. So what did change on your computer?
Did you change the import type to .jpg or .png?
As for Podium crashing, hard to say with no more information than you’ve provided.
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