I don’t know quite what’s happening here. I’m trying to drape some geometry onto a flat plane below. I get random lines draping but not the whole thing. I’ve imported a CAD file and am trying to tidy up the geometry to use it, but having little success.
I don’t know quite what’s happening here. I’m trying to drape some geometry onto a flat plane below. I get random lines draping but not the whole thing. I’ve imported a CAD file and am trying to tidy up the geometry to use it, but having little success.
Are you trying Drape because you can’t create the face in the imported geometry?
Do you know that using the Line tool and drawing over certain existing edges or drawing edges between certain points you can create faces?
Yes. I’m really struggling! The visible geometry is interacting with the hidden geometry, making it really hard to create faces. I saw one tutorial suggest using tags and groups to make faces sequentially. I saw another use drape to flatten out the lines onto a face. Another used a plugin to flatten to plane. None are working and it’s days of work wasted. Help very much appreciated!
I have tried that, and even that’s not working. There must be tiny differnces in the geometry preventing it all snap together.
You can see in the picture above and in the one in the other post that the faces can be created using only the geometry imported from the dwg file.
I’d love to know what you sre doing, that’s different to me! I’ve joined up the geometry to try make faces using endpoints, and this is what it’s doing. Only one face, the rest as just lines.
There are a lot of small gaps that need to be joined/closed.
I’m not using ‘Edge tools’, just the usual line tool. Is that important?
I use the extension to show me where there are gaps.
If you want to make your work easier, you could first prepare the imported geometry (dwg) as best as possible, creating groups for each tag.
Yes, I was going to mention that plugin - SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation
helped me on many an occasion… 
You might like to try this nifty tool too…
What model do you use for work? The one that Riley (endlessfix) created for you?
No. I wanted to be able to do it myself from the DWG. I have another project waiting from the same surveyer, so I need to get to full grips with this. I’ve been working with SKU for 8 years and some things that normally work just don’t seem to be behaving!
Prepare your work base as best as possible to be able to work easily.
I grouped this geometry based on tags and then it’s easy to create the faces.
Of course, especially for the beginners, it is good that after grouping the geometry based on the tags, the geometry should be assigned as Untagged, and the group it belongs to should assign the tag that the geometry had.
In this way, no sticky geometry and a good control of the visibility of the objects. 
OK, thanks so much. I’m doing that now and it seems somewhat better. I’m still getting some sticky bits where geometry overlaps, like where there are door and window openings on the main building. They obvisouly overlap and I’d like to keep that info as it’s useful for me, but even when grouped my geometry wants to interact with bits in other groups it seems?
You’re welcome!
Make sure that you have correctly grouped absolutely all the geometry in your model and you will not have this problem again.
I’m losing my marbles with this. My hidden geomentry is not very hidden. It’s messing with trying to make groups of the tagged lines. I’ve hidden my A-House tag, but while I’m trying to make a group pf my door openings, it’s highlighting and getting all muddled in with the lines. Can you see here?
Thanks for all your help folks. I can’t seem to get this model to work and I’ve not made any progress on my actual design. If you have any good tutorials to follow, please share and I’ll try this another day. I’m going to have to trace along the lines of the pdf as I have a client waiting and I can’t spend another day pulling my hair out!
If you try to group geometry based on tags and rely on turning off a tag and then triple clicking to select the geometry you want, you should know that it will select all the intersecting geometry (hidden or not) that it’s not yet grouped.
It’s all quite simple if you understand the basic things in SketchUp and the way geometry interacts.
The tags are for visibility control, they do not separate the geometry in SketchUp, just like in Autocad.