I feel like I am beating a dead horse, but I am really looking for remedy or remedies with regards to Hidden Geometry.
I know we can turn off the visibility of Hidden Geometry and Lines/Objects, but the root cause of problems is the fact that your/our models are always creating this funky geometry when you go to move, stretch, scale or make any revision to the model. What we need is the ability to turn off the creation of Hidden Geometry/Entities.
When working on a model if you have the visibility turned off those entities still exist and make work much harder as things happen when you try to make modifications to the model.
Can the code be modified to create a switch mechanism or a plugin that can be added in both the computer versions and the iPad versions that will help to automatically remove the hidden garbage.
You can ‘turn off’ the creation of geometry that is hidden by turning on View → Hidden Geometry. But you can’t automatically remove hidden geometry because Hidden and Visible are ‘properties’ of geometry.
It seems like you are creating unwanted geometry (hidden or not). Do you have an example of what’s going awry?
Yes that is exactly what I am talking about…..now when you try to modify, move, erase anything that involves those hidden entities it affects the whole model differently and it does not matter if you have the View Hidden Geometry on or off. I want to simply not have it generated at all or have the ability to delete it all at once.
By turning off the View Hidden Geometry does not stop the creation of the hidden geometry, it just makes it so it’s not visible on the screen. When you allow that and you start making modifications, the areas bound by the hidden geometry affect what happens when making the changes..
Generally speaking the creation of that shattered geometry is more often than not down to user error. It is not something that most of us have to deal with.
Quite often caused by
Having length snapping enabled in Units.
Moving vertices accidentally.
Working with imported files.
Having stray hidden geometry in the file, possibly even in the template.
It would help to see a file in which you have this geometry to see if we can determine how it got there.
That’s what I mean. You can turn it on so you can see it. But it’s not possible to not create hidden geometry. The issue might be more general than hidden geometry. The problem sounds like unwanted geometry. That it’s hidden is secondary.
One thing to be aware of is hidden vs. softened geometry.
Below you can see hidden and softened geometry in the cylinder. Edges that have larger dashes are softened. In the triangular shape you can see a hidden edge with small dashes and another softened edge. Notice that when the face is first selected you can’t tell that there’s a second edge because the edge is softened.
The software needs to be intuitive enough to not create the hidden geometry at all. Especially when you are working in a true x,y, z coordinate system and working in real life measurements at full scale. There should be a user control to turn off or turn on the creation of hidden geometry and not just a viewer of such entities toggle. With it just being a view toggle they all still exist and when you want to alter a face and say move or push/pull you don’t get all of the face because of the hidden geometry. It would make work so much easier, more enjoyable and faster than having to keep looking for the hidden items and erasing them. There could even be a delete/purge of hidden geometry so it could all be gotten rid of with a click or two.
Can you give an example action where SketchUp would create invisible geometry? I mean, not counting creating a cylinder, where the edges are intentionally smoothed.
Unfortunately, that would delete all surfaces (at least two faces bound by a softened edge), hidden edges and faces. That would mean that the cylinder I showed would appear as two circles (which are represented by default with 24 edges). The ‘roof’ of the triangular shape I showed would be missing.
I think what may be going on is that unwanted geometry is creeping into your modeling process (or is being imported) and that is making things frustrating.
Others have pointed to some of the typical culprits (Length Snaping, etc.). Sharing a file would help to show what’s going on.
I’ll show one more thing with the broken roof that can lead to unwanted hidden edges. Deleting softened/hidden faces and surfaces. I’m only showing these to point at what might be going on… we’d need to see an example to get to the bottom of it.
The example screen shot I posted is an example from 2016 when I was having a terrible time with this. I was pulling my hair out and cursing endlessly. My workflow at the time was doing a lot of drafting in my 2D program and then importing DWG to SketchUp and using the imported linework to start modeling faces, etc. I don’t have proof or explanation why, but those imported DWG lines seemed to be the problem. They worked at first, but after a while of modeling and eiting, it would turn into the likes of fractured glass. I have since changed my workflow. I still import drawings, but I just group them, put them on a tag to turn off later and model from scratch with native tools using those drawings as a reference to snap to. I almost never see this problem any more. Again, anecdotal evidence with no rational explanation why the natively drawn lines are purer than the imported ones, but it appears to be the case.
