This is driving me insane……There has to be a way to shut off the generation of hidden geometry. It shows up every time I take simple or plain shapes and go to intersect with selected entities and it shows up. On the iPad you should b e able to shut it off and keep it from generating since we don’t have plug-ins available to cleanup the issue that is created.
I am working on both my MacBook Pro and my iPad Pro. Hidden geometry shows up no matter how I work and it messes with my model. I need a way to remove all of it perhaps in one click instead of going thru and deleting the elements on e at a time. I would even be okay if there was a way to move it all to one layer so that I can just delete the layer.
Preferably I would like to be able to have a setting where I can just toggle off the generation of hidden items, geometry and lines that mess with my model.
Can you share an example skp showing what you mean? Are the edges truly hidden, or are they softened and smoothed such as you get if you pushpull a circle to a cylinder? If the latter, you won’t be happy if they are erased, as the adjacent faces will go away with them.
I’ll take a guess, you’re hiding raw geometry, either manually or through tags.
this is why we only hide groups and components. because when they’re hidden, they can’t interact with anything.
I think we need to dig into your definition of these words a bit deeper to understand what you are talking about. SketchUp does not really “generate” anything hidden or not that you don’t ask it to, you’re probubly seeing a dialogue telling you geometry has merged with other hidden geometry. It is likely that you might have some simple misunderstandings about how geometry works in SketchUp, and with a few corrected practices you could easily avoid the problems you are having. A fundamental concept is that hiding geometry does not stop it interacting with other things. You need to make groups or components of everything you model. This fundamental is true of the desktop, web and ipad versions.
Upload a model that shows this “hidden geometry”. And describe more about the circumstances in which you experience this so we can understand what exactly is happening for you and teach you how to prevent it.
I am drawing a house design.most of the house is orthogonal and each building component is tagged separately. The only item that isn’t recta-linear is the roof which is a 4:12 pitch and a 4 sided hip. The issue comes when I go to intersect objects or components. At that point a ton of hidden line geometry then shows up which messes with the entire model. I hope that makes sense.
I wish we could just had a toggle to turn off hidden line generation.
That hidden geometry only forms when there is something wrong with your model. My guess would be everything is a tiny bit out of square. But without seeing your model we can only guess.
Is this because of incorrect use of 'Intersect Faces:
With Model
With Context
With Selection’ ?
‘Intersect…’ works from within the current context.
For instance: selecting the roof component > intersect with model (= all other objects) creates less edges than selecting all components > intersect with model (also vertical edges).
And the edges will be in the top level context, outside the roof component.
You may want to enter the roof component > select all > intersect with model. This will create edges (horizontal) in the roof component and don’t create any edges (also vertical) from intersecting other components with each other.
As you can tell from the diverse replies you have gotten, we don’t have enough information to do anything but guess. Please share your skp model and I’m sure we can tell you exactly what is going on!
let’s clarify a few points of language and terms. First off is that tags only control visibility, they do not isolate geometry or prevent its interaction with other geometry. You should never be assigning tags to “raw” or un grouped geometry. All your model elements should be components or groups. That’s is the way to isolate distinct elements in your drawing so that they do not interact with anything else in the model. Select the geometry and use the menu at the bottom of the screen on the iPad to create component. Or on desktop right click on selected geometry.
If you assign a tag to some raw geometry and then turn off the visibility for that tag the geometry does not show on your screen but it is still present in your model and ready to stick to with whatever you draw that touches it. Tags do not “remove” the item from your model temporarily, they just hide the item but it’s effectively still there. This is a fundamental concept of SketchUp you will need to understand to use it effectively
Are you using groups and components?
This language needs clarification. There is a specific operation called “intersect faces”, on the iPad it’s in the three dot extended menu at the bottom when something is selected on screen. This is a somewhat advanced technique similar to using solids that allows one to force interaction of selected geometry to create new geometry. Are you actually using this function?
I guess not, (if so it’s probably unnecessary for what you are doing) it’s more likely you are using the word “intersect” to talk about places where elements in your drawn geometry touch other elements. Is this correct?
Components are also specific things in SketchUp, are you using them?
This needs clarification too. There are “hidden” lines in SketchUp. It’s a specific term for edges that purposefully do not show, and they can be toggled on and off easily with a button (it looks like a cylinder with dotted edges in the display buttons of the radial menu on iPad, it’s in the view menu on desktop). One can hide or unhide edges or elements or anything selected with the three dot menu at the bottom of the screen, “hide” is the last option. But I suspect you are not using this menu item, but rather are using the word “hidden line” do describe the edges that are formed from raw geometry interacting with other raw geometry, when they touch new edges are made, correct? this is purposeful and very usefull behavior once understood. And as discussed above this happens weather the geometry in question is visible or not, turning off a tag will not prevent it.
You need to upload your model here if you want clear solutions and advise. Then we can open it and see where you are going wrong in your process and steer you towards smooth SketchUp sailing.