I’m trying to draw irrigation lines on top of a drawing after doing sprinkler heads and water throw circles and sketchup wants to create a bunch of faces on this cluttered diagram whenever I connect a water line from one sprinkler head to the next. How can I disable the creation of faces when a polygon is completed by a line?
Edit per comment:
Irrigation map so far. Manually deleting each new face created…
Short of writing a Ruby Tool script (and perhaps not easily even then), I don’t think it can be done.
It’s hard wired into SU, to create faces from edges when it can.
A work around might be to create the lines inside a new component (with Xray view on if you need to see what’s underneath as you draw), then select the faces when done (you might need the Selection Toys plugin) and Erase them.
Unfortunately, I never want to see the faces between irrigation lines and I don’t want to live in wireframe mode as I’ve imported my plot’s satellite image to help me navigate the topology.
john_mcclenahan,
Bummer. I can write code, but I fear that writing the code would be a lot more time than deleting the new faces when they’re created…
There’s a difference between importing an Image and applying a Material Image to a face.
The former remains visible in Wireframe mode, the latter does not.
Thanks Geo. If you look at this image with the water throw included, you can see that drawing a line to a new sprinkler intersects many many shapes creating many line segments and many “completed” polygons, thus new shape faces.
Another option would be to have a 0% opacity material. When you’re done making all the things that shouldn’t have faces, select all of then and paint bucket fill with the see-through material.
I was going to go that route, but I can’t seem to change the material that lines are as they are being drawn. I have to specify the material after drawing a line and then painstakingly bucket paint each line with that material. That’s how I did the original irrigation lines.
Placing raw geometry on top of raw geometry surely will make a tangled mess.
Making geometry into Groups and Components (grouping) prevents it from melding together.
Create a ‘Water Throw’ Component and an ‘Irrigation Line’ Component(s)
Place instances of the Irrigation Line as necessary and use the Scale tool to achieve desired length.
Place instances of the Water Throw Component as necessary.
You don’t have to. Wireframe is just a temporarily chosen mode while drawing the “connecting” irrigation lines. Water trow circles as multiple component instances (deleted circular face) “on” one layer. Other stuff, also in various groups/components “on” their own layer(s).
Draw inside a new group environment all the connections in wire frame. There won’t be many faces created. And they can be selected easily to delete them in the end. Then you can switch to any style you like.
Also see @Geo’s reply about imported image (as I mentioned above) and @Box’s reply about using layers. Leave Layer0 the active layer, unlike in your first screenshot showing the layers, (irrigation lines is active).
