I’d appreciate some help with creating a pattern with grooves for a door. I wanted to model the details in SketchUp. Here’s what I produced using Push/Pull, which is fine from a distance as I know that PnP doesn’t go round corners.
For assessing feasibility of my idea, it wasn’t necessary to figure out a smooth 90 degree angle connecting the horizontal grooves with the vertical ones but it’s still bugging me that I can’t quite figure out how to do this.
I’ve never used the follow me tool in earnest and it kinda scares me because I don’t quite understand it if I’m honest but I suspect it’s what I would use here? The approach I took was to create a series of 7mm arches in the side of the door and then do a push pull far enough to hit the outside edge of the groove coming up from below. If I go any further, the geometric shapes cross and it causes a right mess. But obviously they shouldn’t cross anyway, they should turn properly round the corner.
Would someone be so kind and walk me through what to do to do this properly? All of the videos I’ve found online sort of lose me at some point or there’s some click and that bam everything looks different and my brain hurts!!
Would you share the .skp file? If you want square corners where the horizontal and vertical grooves to join at a right angle you just need to draw horizontal and vertical edges to use as a path for Follow Me. If you want a radiused corner where the groove changes direction just add an arc at the corner of the path.
Dues to the small radius of the arcs I would suggest making a copy of the component, scale the copy up and to the Follow Me operations on the larger copy.
Is this supposed to represent a real surface? If so, you’ll likely need to change the arc profile for the grooves as there’s no practical way to cut those grooves with the opening narrower that the width of the groove below the surface. What you have looks something like the arc shown in blue.
Yep, I just did exactly this (so I won’t post mine ;))
(I am not the OP)
Follow me is perfect for this.
Separately, if you didn’t use follow me then you could probably just fix/open 1 corner and copy/paste that geometry diagonally to the next corner then multiply till it copies to all channels (or just do the follow me… for simplicity).
@kirsten1 keep in mind that adding this detail to your model can bloat the file with a ton of geometry. It might be better to create a texture to use on the doors in your model. That wouldn’t be difficult to make and would help to avoid performance issues.
Thank you all so much for the quick input and the live video… different timezone here so only just waking up. Will have a play this evening my time and get back to you but it looks simple enough
Thanks for holding my hand with this - I fixed the shape to something more realistic (by using a half-circle rather than an arc which caused the bulge) and got over my “follow-me” fear. The result looks significantly better and is now actually something I can use for the carpenter…
Though I drew the line for each of the paths, instead of what you did which looked like you were only using one path line? That seems easier in principle but I’m not sure how SketchUp would figure out how far to take each side. I mean it clearly does based on your screen recording, but I don’t understand it well enough to apply it without tying myself in a knot and losing hours of time… I guess doing it manually the first time round didn’t do me any harm to help me learn. Now that I got the hang of it, I can look for more efficient ways of achieving what I want. I shall have a little play.
Thanks again for helping me get over my mental block.
FWIW, you can draw a half circle with the 2-point arc tool. You just have to pay attention to not draw the bulge beyound the half circle point.
Follow Me will start the extrusion perpendicular to the end of the first segment of the path and finish it at the end and perpendicular to the last segment in the path. It’s often useful to keep the path separate from the profile being extruded. Especially when you have multiple extrusions. Crown molding, chair rail, and base molding, for example.
