Gearing Up with Sketchup

The erase tool doesn’t erase faces at all. Usually you delete a face by doing a single click on that face, then pressing the Delete key (or backspace, whatever the Windows one is called). Don’t know how you managed to get it to delete the face that wasn’t selected.

Indeed it is, and that isn’t how SketchUp normally works! Sorry to say, there was something odd about how you originally drew the disc and rectangle. I’m glad you got it sorted. At some point you should go back and retry it to see if you can figure out where you went astray, as learning how to draw correctly will benefit you greatly in the future.

Still something going on that is definitely not right. When the face of the disc above is pulled up you can see the vertical corners of the holes, but in my disc rendering there is no such thing… It looks like it lifted the surface plane with holes in it above a bottom plane also with holes in it such that my rendering literally appears to be hollow. except I can’t see diagonally down through the top holes to the bottom holes.

I can see into the holes and see the outer edge of the lower disc and the inside surface of the vertical of the outer edge of the cylinder and this is not supposed to be.

You mean it appears transparent?

Possibly the bottom face is missing after PushPull?

If that is the case (and it normally isn’t) undo the PushPull, then do it again after tapping the Ctrl key which forces PushPull to leave a copy of the original face, as well as making a new one. Though it may leave the original face reverse side out.

OK Sages, Gurus, and SketchUp Scholars… This is what I get every single time!

What am I doing wrong?
The holes are not defined except at the very opening to the plane of the disc and I don’t think the bottom face is missing or the color would/should be the background green but instead it is a dark grey from the auto-shading feature of SketchUp.
STEP RIGHT UP!!! TRY YOUR LUCK

Click the face inside the rectangle with select tool, it will turn dotted.
Press delete key to delete it.
Do not make rectangle a component.
Finish rectangle circular array
Push pull face up
Then make whole thing component

I just repeated the process again with the same result and a bit more info for you than what is shown in the video…
There are no holes at all in the bottom disc surface.
It created a hollow object which can be looked inside of with the only holes being in the very top surface yet you all saw it was showing the background green when I made them. Now really living up to my forum handle :confounded:

The cat meowing confused my dogs.

Just on the question of selecting the outside lines and then doing a right-click erase, look at your own video. The right-click itself has the effect of deselecting the edges you carefully selected, and it selects the face, which is what then gets erased. You need not have selected the edges.

I just did a quick scan back in this topic and (please forgive me if I’m wrong) you have never shared a sample file that we can examine to understand where you are going astray. We try to give clear directions but you repeatedly run into problems anyway. There’s a communication breakdown between here and there, and I don’t know how to bridge it…

SUCCESS!!!

THANK YOU EVERYBODY !!!

You have all been exceedingly generous with your time (and probably had a few chuckles along the way but I don’t mind)…
But back to the title of this thread and a whole new can of worms if you don’t mind…
Where do I get the Gears plug-in and how do I install it?

Just on the question of selecting the outside lines and then doing a right-click erase,
Thought it was necessary in order to define the area to be highlighted (the face).

Did my suggestion work?
I think 1. You deleted the edges of the rectangle
2. You mixed raw geometry with components

Like a Champ!!! I thought they were combining the rectangle sides into an entity and never realized all the were doing was highlighting all “boxed” components.
Thank you!

Either the whole thing needs to be a component or raw geometry you cannot mix. Also you deleted the edges of the rectangle not the face.
I suggest you look at a few basic tutorials if you are to continue with sketchup it will help grasp the concepts a bit better. (Especially component)
I’m glad you got it sorted
I will now sleep its 1 am!

ThorleyianSketchUpper
15h

“Also you deleted the edges of the rectangle not the face”.
but the face is what erased when I did that and the green background was shown through the rectangular hole. Visually… how am I supposed to know the difference?
The good news - and to everyone’s relief… SketchUp For Dummies arrives tomorrow.

ThorleyianSketchUpper
15h
Confused

  1. You mixed raw geometry with components

Since everything in SketchUp consists of linear faces - no true curves - isn’t it raw geometry that defines and is needed to draw all of it, and wouldn’t that in and of itself mandate that it be part of a component? Where is the breakpoint between large raw geometry that you seem to have referred to, and the minute raw geometry?

This statement lives up to your username! Hopefully a bit of reading the “for Dummies” book (which I bought years ago and learned a lot from it) will clarify things for you.

In a nutshell, yes, all basic geometry in SketchUp is composed of finite straight edges and finite planar faces bounded by edges. But by design, these entities “stick to” each other wherever they touch, making the notion of a “thing” or “object” awkward. Groups and Components exist to create isolated “contexts” in which a collection of edges and faces interact only with each other and can not stick to anything outside the context.

So, you can draw a face inside a Component and then draw a second face in the identical place outside the Component and they will not merge or stick together. But you will see “z-fighting” visual effects indicating that they share the same place in space, and you can indeed get confused about which one you are seeing and manipulating because it depends on whether the Component is open for edit or not.

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As I mentioned, look at your own video. When you right-clicked on the face inside the selected rectangle edges, that action deselected the edges and selected the face. So, it wasn’t the edges that were selected at the time you did the Erase.

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