Help with connecting faces of wall

[stijnc67]

hey there,
can anyone help me with connecting my walls in my drawing?
i measure my walls with a leica 3d disto.
but sometimes i can’t measure the corner of the wall, so i measure 4points off the wall.
but how can i easy draw the corner of the 2 walls?
the problem is that most off the walle aren’t level. so it isn’t a flat wall.

i sent one example of 2 walls and the sealing.
so i need one vertical intersection (between the 2 walls) and 2 horizontal intersections (between wall and sealing)
can someone help me to do this easily?test_wall.skp (20.1 KB)

[JimD]

There are a couple of things going on here.

If you’re looking to also get SketchUp to draw in the ‘faces’ as it typically always does, then your going to need to ‘triangulate’ your walls. . . Which is to say it’s necessary to draw an additional line in between opposing corners… such that the line starts at top lefthand corner, and then ends at the lower right corner.

Once you do this SketchUp will be able to assign a surface to the triangular plane which you’ve made by drawing in the diagonal line. It’s really now two surfaces within SU, but if you hide the diagonal line you can fake the appearance of a single surface.

As far as finding where the intersections happen…

I’d go about this by making a copy of each wall, and placing each ‘wall copy’ into it’s own ‘group’. Then use the Move tool so that you can slide the copied walls along the plane/path of the original one.

Try the Scale Tool for extending the Wall Heights, so that they meet with the ceiling.

Finally run the ‘intersect faces’ command on the copied walls and that should get SU to draw in where the intersections happen.

At some point Pray to the Gods of Interpretation and Compromise for forgiveness, because you’ll never find a common meeting point for all the existing corners to extend to… Things will have to move, and that’s going stand in harsh opposition to your idealism and general perfectionism in taking field measurements with the Leica Disto.

As fate would have it, I own a Leica Disto too—not the newer D series, but their original A series. It cost me a ton of money… and I’ve since learned that I don’t let it boss me around when it comes to placing too much faith in it’s accuracy.

The Distance accuracy with the disto is surprisingly good… but it’s ability to measure angles via the tilt sensor don’t match the same high standard.

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Some hopefully helpful Notes after my little Disto Rant…

For making copies of your walls. copy the entire existing group… and then use the ‘paste in place’ function. That will will set the copies back to the exact position they were made in.

The intersect Faces command is found on the ‘Right Click’ context menu.

If you paint the copied wall a unique color it’s a lot easier to not get confused between the original and the copies.

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test_wall (alt JD).skp (265.0 KB)

[stijnc67]

thank you for you explanation.

i understand now what you mean.
but when i start to do this.
draw a line between the two corners he doens’t make 2 faces (normaly i think he must colorize the faces?
it stays different lines…

[JimD]

@stijnc67

draw a line between the two corners he doens’t make 2 faces (normaly i think he must colorize the faces?

The diagonal line should work… I tried it to make sure that it would. I think that you must be trying to draw it now from outside the wall group.

Double click on the walls so that you can get into the ‘edit mode’ for that set of geometry. It’s essential that you do this from inside the wall groups edit mode. You need the line to interact with the other edges or SU won’t include it into the group you’ve already made.

[JimD]

Critiquing my comments above:

You don’t even need to create copies of the walls… it is possible to just move them independently… but to do that you have to be well versed with how SU tracks along off angles—angles which aren’t part of the primary X.Y.Z directions.

I figured that the copy was the safest way to go since you’d always have the original wall in place as a reference. no matter what happened with a move tool.

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However, in terms of building up good model technique: the copy idea probably holds you back from learning more natural and advanced SU skill.

You could also, for example use the Axis tool… and reset the Axis to track the direction which you want the wall to slide on. Doing that once for each wall would also get you to the same place… with arguably a lot more elegance than all of the copy stuff I originally mentioned.

… and alternative to the Axis move tool,… there’s also the simple guideline which could be drawn in… and used as a reference aid.

The KEY to the success of any of this is to have each wall setup within its own group status… otherwise you’ll end up finding that they stick to each other (once they start to touch), and won’t, thereafter, move in an independent fashion.

Anyhow, I apologize if this just serves to cloud up the situation… I don’t mean to add in additional confusion here by intermixing techniques. Let this serve instead as a couple of alternative approaches.

In a serious sort of way… it’s well worth learning how to fix this type of problem with a wide variety of methods. Working with non-planar geometry is a bit tricky, but the solutions build up a good bag of SketchUp tricks for future reference.