Drawing ellipses

This used to be simple. In knowledge base it says select ellipse tool… is this not available in “Make” it is not in my tools. If I could figure out how to place the rectagle with precision I could probably scale it but have been thwarted in my efforts so far :frowning:

There is no longer an ellipse tool, but it is very easy to create an ellipse. First draw a circle at the desired center point. Then triple-click the circle to select the Face and all the Edges. Now select the scale tool and resize either the length or width by dragging the “handle” in one or the other side of the scale tool rectangle. Once you start to drag a handle, you can type either a scale multiplier or an exact size into the VCB (you will need to append a units indicator to the exact size so that SU knows it is not a scale factor).

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Hi!

LayOut has a special tool for drawing ellipses - but SketchUp doesn’t.

Here’s a short knowledge center article about drawing an ellipse in SU:
http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/39329

And an article about drawing an ellipse in LO:
http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/95629

-Marc

Tx Marc & slaumgarter. I will look into this after voting. :slight_smile:

The problem I am having with this method is that the segments end up being uneven and therefore the geometry is inaccurate. Is there a way to control the distortion so my axes are symmetrical towards the segment positioning?

Unfortunately, using the native scale tool as I recommended about 7 years ago, the answer is no. Scale stretches the bounding rectangle of each segment, and depending on the original slope, this will change the length of the segment differently. I haven’t looked in a long time, as I don’t do many ellipses that need that kind of precision, but there might be an extension that generates ones with equal segment lengths - it is theoretically possible.

There are a few Ellipse plugins on the SketchUcation plug-in store. See if any of them give a result that you like.