Follow me not following path

Hi guyz,

sorry for newbie and probably many times repeated question, which seems to bother most of beginners. But what am I doing wrong when drawing a path for follow me pipe?
1.) I use PENCIL to draw straight-edge shape, consisting of few 90-degree lines
2.) Then I use 2-point-arc tool to round the edges, and here I cannot get consistency:

  • if I use dotted lines for helper, to draw rounded arc exactly 10mm from edge, my arc line connects in some weird manner, see ??? examples below - either follow me is totally broken at arc line, OR follow-me creates only outer radius, but not inner.
  • but if I don’t care for exact rounded corners, so I create them by hand WITHOUT dotted lines help, then follow-me creates full extruded pipe, just as it should

What am I doing wrong?

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Looks like you’re working with small dimensions and running into the tiny face issue. How many sides are you using when you draw the circles? How many for the arcs? This is a good place to apply the Dave Method.

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The upper example looks like a possible issue with small faces, as @DaveR wrote, though we would have to look at the skp file to investigate. Can you share the file?

The lower example appears to be missing the arc portion of the path. That’s odd unless you created the two parts shown using two separate follow-me operations. Followme requires a continuous path.

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Geez…indeed it looks like at some smaller path RADIUS and tube DIAMETER problems begin to accumulate. If I go with smoother path corners and bigger tube radius all works fine.
Looks like I need to create base elements, like 45 and 90 degree tubes and accemble parts like in reality.
Thanx, guyz!

Not necessarily. You need to model in a way that avoids the very short edges that are below the limits of SketchUp’s tolerance. This is not difficult to do buut you just need to do it.

Hmmm…I tried to create bent stainless steel rod of 5mm diameter and with rounding radius of 20mm. Most decorative rods here are created that way, with simmilar radius. I really did not expect to hit low res limits of sketchUp at that level…maybe if I would go into sub-millimeter range.

2nd hmmm…what if I would scale whole model up like 10-fold, or use cm instead of mm as base unit, then after final printout I would scale it down 10-times? Plausible?

5mm dia. is pretty small.

Why don’t you do what I suggested and use the “Dave Method”? No need to scale up and scale back down.

Generally if I’m going to be modeling something that small I would scale up by 1000 or just model in meters.

Here I used the “Dave Method” to get a 5mm dia. rod bent around a 10mm radius. I scaled the copy up by 1000 first.

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