I have a model where for whatever reason, some of the splines in a curve are “hidden” and some are not. (By default a curve has them hidden, with a soft curve texture.)
I would like to hide the line segments in the spline.
Using Edit + Hide doesn’t do the trick…well, not exactly. It works just fine until I do an “Unhide.” I hide surfaces and then unhide everything frequently so that I can work inside of a model. So I can’t use “Edit + Hide” in this way.
What does Sketchup do to hide these splines, and how can I select them and have them be treated the same way so that I don’t have to look at them constantly?
Note that I don’t want to hide ALL line segments, just those in curves. I am willing to manually pick them, but then what?
I think instead of hiding those edges, I would soften them. Select all of the geometry, right click and choose Soften/Smooth. The default softening angle is 20° so if the angle between the faces is greater than 20°, the edges won’t be softened. You can adjust the Soften slider if needed, though.
a “soft” edge forms the boundary between two faces that are interpreted as parts of a single multi-face surface. It is “soft” in the sense that it doesn’t really separate the faces, as opposed to a “hard” edge that would separate them.
a “smooth” edge affects how the two visible faces adjoining the edge are shaded by lighting. Ordinarily, SketchUp shades faces as if light is scattered from a flat surface of each face. One square to the light direction is bright, and one at an angle is dimmer, going full dark when perpendicular. That shading creates a visible dihedral “crease” at the edge even if the edge itself isn’t visible. When an edge is smoothed, SketchUp creates the illusion that the surface changes gradually from the scattering behavior of one face to the scattering behavior of the other one, giving the appearance of a smoothly curved surface.
Most of the time a model looks best when an edge is both soft and smooth.
