Help with getting a traced image solid

I have traced an image of a lion head into SketchUp and cannot for the life of me seem to get it solid:

I have tried using Solid Inspector. I have also attempted to flatten then image using “Work Plane” and “Flatten to Plane,” but I am not certain I am making any headway. I would like to be able flatten the image, make it solid, and then be able to push/pull the image to add height to it for 3-D printing. Any chance someone may be willing to take a look at my file and help me figure out what I am doing wrong? Sorry for the noob question. I appreciate anyone willing to offer some advice, so thank you in advance.

Lion Head.skp (1.3 MB)

Adrian

Hi Adrian,

I’d say the first and possibly main problem is that you have an excess of nested groups.

In SU groups are used to isolate geometry… and you basically need everything to exist within the same group… or NO GROUP at all, while you are still making connection between all of the various edges.

Open up the Outliner window and keep running the explode command until everything is sitting at the same level.

From there you need to draw in lines between the curves in order to get SU to generate the faces your looking for.

Green Arrow = the kind of line you need to draw to help SU generate the faces. Back track over these lines and delete them once the face has been filled in.

Red Arrow = the stray lines you need to delete

Also notice how the Outliner panel has only one level of geometry on it.

If you keep going along like this, you should eventual get it done.

But IF you end up running into a section that wont close for you then start looking for Gaps (small spaces) in the line work. SU won’t generate a face for open loops… in the same way that it also won’t generate a face if edges aren’t coplanar.

Depending on the size you need this to be, another recommendation would be to simplify the curves. I don’t know how many line segments your model has but it must be a LOT. That makes it way harder to close loops.

You might try drawing over your model using series of arcs so that you pare it down to the minimum you need to get the effect and see if that does the trick.

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You can make it work but you need to clean up all the stray edges and reduce the number of segments.

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