Drape Tool outside of terrain

SketchUp Pro
1

I’m trying to drape a line segment onto a terrain mesh, but the resulting drape ends up merged with the terrain. I’d like to have the draped line segment exist in its own group, outside of the terrain. According to this http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/95046 I should be able to do this by making sure the terrain and the entities I want to drape are in separate groups, but it always ends up merged no matter what I do. Any suggestions? #drapetool #sandbox

2

I have the same problem with Sketchup 2016! Trying to use Sketchup 8 as a workaround but it keeps crashing.

3

The link unfortunately leads to ‘Access denied’
I can’t get the draped geometry in a separate group’s environment either.

I know of two ways to separate the draped geometry from the terrain mesh.
(draping on hidden geometry with ‘Hidden Geometry’ on does nothing!)
Both method do work with applying an extra layer to make separating terrain and drape possible and use 'copying or cut to clipboard’. One reveals a SketchUp bug that you can work your way around. The other is quite solid.

Solid method: (taken that all geometry in the model still has Layer0 assigned to it, not that it matters much)

  • create a new layer temp and … temporarily make it the active layer
  • drape the path onto the terrain
  • make Layer0 the active layer again
  • being in the terrain group:
    — hide layer temp > select all ([Ctrl]+[A]) > unhide layer temp > window select all, leaving you with the selected draped path > cut to clipboard
  • close the terrain group
  • ‘Paste in Place’ the path from clipboard.> assign Layer0 to its geometry and group it.
  • purge layers to get rid of temp layer

The buggy method I need to investigate some more.
In this method the terrain is temporarily ‘assigned to’ layer temp and the draped path still has Layer0. But cutting it to clipboard leaves it selected. One has to use undo several times to go back to before ‘cut to clipboard’.
Clipboard still has the path saved to ‘Paste in Place’ in another environment.

4

This is actually a pretty great solution. One suggestion that may be quicker is instead of hiding layer0 in order to select everything on the temporary layer, just right-click on one of the edges > Select > All on same layer, and it should select all entities on the temporary layer. Pretty much just as fast as hiding layer0 though, so idk.

Thanks for the great idea :slight_smile: