The main problem I have is that I cannot use the current format to “decorate” the part here with indented Bezier curves. I know, I tried. Much to my surprise, it didn’t work. I’ve been learning to use Thom Thom’s SubD Toolset, which is great because I started out using Vertex Tools and QuadFace Tools.
If someone could help point me in the right direction, that would be great. Thanks.
That is one messy model. I doubt you can run SubD or Artisan on that without further tweaking .
There isn’t much more to say than ely said already.
The only thing you can do is try to understand why he said that.
SubD needs some special kind of modelling to work properly. Vertex tools helps you with that but even so it only helps if you are willing to follow a certain way of thinking.
That particular shape wouldn’t be too hard to acomplish using those tools, but you really should start from scratch, if you want to make your life easier.
Thanks, guys, for being as honest as you have been. Other parts of the model seem to work quite well with using SubD once I found out they, too, were unable to have curves etched into them.
Honestly, I found myself going to bed last night wondering if the best way to do it might not be to measure out all the dimensions, print multiple angles, and start from scratch. Perhaps I could import screen shots I had taken as images.
Of course, that begs one question. The front part of the model (which you don’t see, because the back part is shown) was originally going to be made using the sandbox “smoove” tool, and then converted to Quadface. [This is the last part of the model, please understand I hadn’t done that particular step].
How does the process work using SubD? Obviously not using smoove and converting to quadface. Thanks.
Let see what is the exact shape you want to recreate … Then we can help you a lot easier.
Okay, here are two other screen shots. Like I said, in doing the “front” I hadn’t gotten around to using the “smoove” button from the Sandbox Tools (because I had them “hidden” from view") and so I just did a bunch of boxes one night, late at night, just to get it done (remember this was the last part of my model and I basically wanted to go back and start going from the roughed-up work to refined details), until later on, when I checked the “Sandbox Tools” and remembered that "Oh, yeah, I have the “Smoove tool” and I also have the Quadface Tools, which have a button to generate a section of quads from a section of Sandbox terrain.
It also wasn’t quite done. That’s because the upper inner part is actually inside another part of the model, and even the upper, outer parts (which jut out) do so in coordination with other parts of the model that come down and hang over/touch the parts that jut out.
Now I will have to figure it out in some other way in SubD.
I really appreciate your help on this. I know it seems like a lot, but when you consider that a) I did go to school for architecture; b) the school I went to had a philosophical stance against teaching their students CAD, c) they caved because their accredidation was threatened by the SACS (but not before I graduated), d) I suffered a stroke 18 years ago, to the left side of my brain, not a big deal, but sometimes I just don’t get things that are obvious until someone points them out-- or for instance, me forgetting about the “Smoove” tool simply because I unchecked the “Sandbox Tools” in my “View”>“Toolbars”. Then when I checked it, I saw the “Smoove Tool” and went “Oh, there’s a button in Quadface Tools that will change it from Sandbox to Quadface”.
I’ve been working on this thing for 4 years now. Everybody’s been awesome though!
I meant more like : Don’t you have an image or a drawing you are working from ?
At last, if possible, share the model and after a cleanup you can say what do you want to do with it.
All right, I’ll share it. Worked on it for 4 years, but 1/2 of that time I was recovering from 3 stays in the hospital.
Idea came from my head, actually have the process all the way through for what it will look like rendered. Started working on the female’s face with Thom Thom Vertex Tools and some help from Quadface Tools. Then built everything out from there. Yes, it does look exactly like what I imagined in my head.
Except for the breastplate and the bottom part, everything else is symmetrical, so I literally have to work on the right side, designs and all, and then “flip” it. But, the breastplate still needs a few minor touches, and it gets things added onto it.
Inside part isn’t finished yet, but that is one piece.
Biggest problem is, the front pieces will all take the designs that are etched into them, but neither the side, nor the back pieces will. I didn’t realize that when I put the model together, so now I have to adjust. Fortunately, when I worked on the project, I saved every part that I worked on, so now I can go back and use SubD on most of them. Have spent most of every waking minute the past two and a half weeks watching every video, even Thom Thom’s 45:00 one on SubD and Quads.
I just want to figure this thing out, so I can get rolling on it, and get to the design part. I thank God for Thom Thom’s SubD Tool. I had a problem with my computer slowing ddooowwwnn, so starting in the middle of December we tried to have one built, we miscommunicated or they misheard, but we had to go and buy another one, but the day it got delivered I went into the hospital for emergency surgery to take my gall bladder out. So, I didn’t get to work on my model until April.
About two weeks in, I saw a video of Thom Thom’s SubD Tools and I immediately downloaded it. All of the design work will be done with Bezier curves or SubD things.
If you select the right side (all faces and lines), right-click on it with the mouse, and hit “Make Component…”, and name it “Half” you will have all those faces tidy and neat inside a kind of editable box.
You can then copy that box and flip the copy along any of the model’s axis:
Now you can joing original and copy by the middle seam, and then you can hit “space” for selection tool and double click on either one of the sides wich will allow it to be edited.
When you’re using components copies editing one will edit all the others.
Also you can rightclick a component at any time and select “Save as…” wich will save your component as a sketchup model on a folder in your hard drive disk.
At any time you can right click the component and select “Reload”, and this will allow you to swap your component with another.
This way you can save many versions of your parts and they will be way easier to work with.
Another thing you can do is, after you doubleclicked a component for edition, you can go to “View > Component Edit > Hide Similar Components…” wich will allow you to work on one side, without seeing the other side. This is a toggle so toggling it on and off will dynamically allow you to edit and use the inference system to edit your components.
Also you can go to “Window > Preferences > Shortcuts” and define a shortcut to this toggle.
When you’re using components copies editing one will edit all the others
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Actually, I don’t want to do this yet, because of a couple of instances where I’ve made mistakes and went and pulled a piece back from the other side of the model. Now, the parts of the model are broken down into groups on the right side only (except the breastplate and the bottom part), and I know exactly where the split-line is, it’s easy for me to find even when I am dead tired and can barely remember if we conversed about something. Written forms are easier to remember.
But, here is what I thought about last night as I drifted off to sleep-- what if I am making it too hard by thinking about doing the things in SubD, and perhaps there is a simpler way to deal with the problem. Maybe not. I’m still not all that familiar with every aspect of SketchUp to know.
I went back and included two of the early parts (well, not really, because I had already finished the face, which I did a lot like Rich O’Brien did using Thom Thom’s Vertex Tools, only mine ended up taking more time because I’m not the expert like Mr. O’Brien is, I chose to do a human face, with all the details, and I just found myself being so precise I modeled it at such an overwhelming level of fineness it drove me batty); but the point is that you can see where I then began to model the curves that came out and formed the back part of her mask. [I did have a drawing that I made, but it was strictly a side view, sorry I forgot, because by this point I think it was gone forever]. But the thing that I did was take the pencil and draw pieces that would connect together.
I want to point out here that at the beginning I tried a few plugins-Curviloft and Soap and Skin Bubble, but they didn’t work very well, because I had every curve at specific angles. Plus, as you can see in the bottom picture of the model, that particular piece to the right is actually the piece that is joined in to the curved pencil-drawn line extending from the front all the way to the back, and it then connects onto the bottom part that I showed you at the beginning. So, there are actually two curves that join together to make up each part that comes off of the front and makes up the back of her helmet.
The problem I ran into, which surprised the heck out of me, is that SketchUp will not let those pieces accept indented Bezier curves. Which, to be perfectly honest, shocked me. Looking at the model head-on, those surfaces accept indented Bezier curves. With Thom Thom’s SubD Tools, I can easily decorate the breastplate, and parts on the top. [Actually, if I wanted to add something to any part of the model, you know, like “gluing it on”, there would be no problem.]
But it’s the sides and the back that I cannot use the “Push/Pull” tool on (which I need to “pull” in Bezier curves).
Also, you wanted to know why I am doing this? I suppose that also means why am I doing this in this way? Because 20-25 years ago I went to college to study architecture. I learned a process of how to do things there that I am repeating here. First, you get an idea. Then you work it through. You come out with a rough model/drawings. Then you fine tune. Finally you complete a set of drawing and a model (rendering in SketchUp) to go present your work before a jury of three architects (one of which is your professor).
Along the way, you have certain classes set aside to show what you have done so you can get feedback from your professor and your peers.
This reminds me of the absolute best project I ever did in college. We were assigned a short paper by one of the most well-known architects who competed with Frank Lloyd Wright, LeCorbusier. LeCorb’s paper was about photography and how one should go about doing it. Completely caught everybody off-guard. But based on this paper we were tasked with designing a small apartment for a photographer. It had to have a dark room so he could develop his pictures. Everyone was pretty much stumped, but for me, I “saw it”, the whole apartment, where everything should go, all at once. I jotted down my idea, and made a model (a real one, using x-acto blades and what-ever you call it kind of board). So, we had the first class jury about two weeks into the quarter. My professor was from Pakistan. So, he went through and basically trashed everyone else’s. Then got to mine and totally changed the subject, never saying a word about my model. It was like that the whole quarter. But I couldn’t “see” any way to change my apartment design, and he would just come around, basically look over my shoulder and move on. Remember, he had spent most of his life in Pakistan.
So, I got my things ready for the jury, basically going in knowing I was toast. So, I set up my project on the farthest point so I could get out of there once I got blasted up, down, left, right and backwards and forwards too. Basically, everybody got blasted, some of them quite horribly. Even the shining star of architecture in that year only did okay. Then they got to me. The Pakistani professor had his Greek professor and a grad architecture student, and they started talking to me.
“You got it exactly right. You understood exactly what LeCorbusier said about photography and how to adapt it to the apartment for the photographer. But then you should have gone on and designed what every detail was. For instance, what were the screws that held up the piece of photography made of?” And on and on. Despite my project being “unfinished” as compared to the really whiz-bang dude, they gave me a B+, that’s how much I nailed it. My design had not changed, well except for working on the details, but literally the measurements didn’t change, it just didn’t go far enough.
I will never forget that as long as I live. So now, with this project, I am determined to finish what I started. So, now I need help, and I am asking for it.
So, SubD is up for grabs, but there might be a better way to use another set. Like Sandbox Tools (that I have no idea how to use in its totality). I just know that Sandbox tools can be converted to Quadface Tools.
But there it is. I have a process that I go through.
You need to ask specific questions on specific parts of your model to get the right answers.
Otherwise is like asking how you should wire your bedroom right side lamp switch and you just show us the roof of your house.
If you have your model divided into small groups or components, save the one with problems as a separate object and upload it here as a skp file and we can see what the problem is and how to improve or fix it.
Other than that, you have put some detailing into that work!
I tried to use SubD on it but I got the message, “The mesh cannot be subdivided because there are edges connected to more than two faces.” I have no idea what this means, and sent an e-mail to Thom Thom asking him. Including if I needed to add a second layer to the quad as was done later on in the you tube video of the “spoon in SubD”.
I’ve got it down about the problems with working with triangles and n-gons, I just wondered if something like that – particularly the n-gons, was a problem here.
1000_workingomaat’sface_566611.skp (491.3 KB)
I’m so sorry about that, misread that you wanted the actual .skp file. So here it is. Any help that you could give me would be super. And, sorry about changing the subject slightly. Got the very first part that I showed you worked out on how to do SubD.
That part is really messy… Why do you have that wireframe over the actual part ? Why some of the geometry is outside the group ?
You need to have no loose edges and all the geometry to be tidy to run SubD.
Wow. Frell me dead. I had it as a wireframe, then I went a step further, converted it to quadface and then tried to convert THAT to SubD. So, I guess I did a really stupid thing. Well, I did the smart thing, and then I messed it up by doing the absolute dumbest thing imaginable.
Thank you very, very much!
If you look up to the post about 13d ago, where I included two .gif’s, the bottom one has off to the side a “feather”, which you will also see 1/2 of again at the bottom of the page. Each “feather” represents the bottom of the section of the model that you helped me with. So, now I’ve got to go and refresh myself on how to put a designated line (0.40) or whatever. It’s on the SubD selection menu. Right now, I’m going to bed because I have a sinus infection.
You know, my admiration continually increases for all you fellow users of SketchUp! Thank you, ely862me, I can’t tell you how much you have meant to my learning process.
Wait a minute, here. Did you retouch the one with the quads and then use SubD on that? Or did you take the wireframe one and use the SubD on that, bypassing the need for quads all together?
Just curious, my brain is not functioning well, I’m very sorry, I have got one of the worst, if not the worst, sinus infections, I can ever remember. Fever and it hurts down to my upper teeth. I may not have saved the wireframe, even though I’m so ■■■■ about saving every part of the model in case I mess up (that’s the only thing in my life where I’m ■■■■ about anything).
they crossed out the part where I said I’m a-n-a-l…come on…that was the proper English word use of that term…
Honestly I think you don’t need SubD on your model, unless you are looking for a really smooth surface for something like …cnc or 3d printing.
I retouched a bit the quad part you already had-removed lonely edges and unwanted geometry, filled the gaps etc.
