I am trying to create horizontal faces inside of a sphere but it keeps creating vertical faces with the softened geometry on the exterior of the sphere. I swear it never used to do this and I have accidentally changed something to make it behave this way but now I don’t know how to change it back, any help would be much appreciated.
There’s a plugin called geometry default layer, I assigns all the loose geometry to the “untagged” tag, you should always work with the untagged active, assign tags only to groups or components.
What are you actually trying to accomplish? I don’t see a sphere in your video clip.
Also what version of SketchUp are you using? Your profile says you are using the “Free Plan” but that’s not what your video shows.
Sorry it only let me upload one of the videos because my account is new.
I downloaded the trial for the Pro version of 2023 after using 2017 quite a bit.
Basically I want to make a sphere and then have horizontal 'shelves inside of it at set heights. I use a line up the blue axis to space out the shelves evenly but if I connect the line to the top and bottom of the sphere it creates all of this vertical faces which I don’t want and then have to go through and delete.
I was wondering if there is a way to stop the vertical faces other than just making sure that my center blue axis line doesn’t go all the way from the top to the bottom of the sphere?
I’m also asking because I was sure that I had done this before and not run into this problem.
So you’re using SketchUp Pro. Please correct your profile as that information goes a long way in helping us help you correctly.
Share your SketchUp file so we can see your exact set up. It looks like you need to change your workflow. What is this thing supposed to be when you get finished with it?
Based on your description, this might be one way I would approach it. If I knew more about what you actually want to end up with, I might have a different solution.
Pretty much exactly what you have made there but I was using the central axis of the sphere to measure height out vertically to distance the shelfs rather than just placing them at the existing horizontal lines that were created when building the sphere (eg I want shelf 1 0.8m up from the mid point, then shelf 2 0.4m up from shelf 1 etc). My only issue with it is if one of my lines goes all the way to the outside then it fills the sphere up with all these unwanted faces which are messy and may go unnoticed.
Essentially I was just trying to find out if I could stop those faces forming. As you can see in that clip I don’t even have a line on the bottom half of the blue axis and sketchup still decides for me that it will form a vertical circle.
Again, share the .skp file. And again, what is it you are actually trying to model?
I was just trying to cut horizontal grooves in these circles as a test and was getting frustrated by the vertical faces appearing when I swear that didn’t in the past.
Untitled.skp (121.6 KB)
Are you hiding the top of the sphere? If so, what you see is perfectly normal because you are merging new geometry with the hidden when you make the vertical edge. If you erase the top of the sphere you won’t have that issue. There’s nothing different about this in SU2023 than in any preious version.
If you fill the face at the equator by tracing an edge segment instead of drawing in the radials, you’ll get a face and you won’t be creating edges that will merge with the vertical edge and hidden edges of the sphere to create those vertical slices.
Thank you for the help. Building off the edge instead of radials and making sure my vertical line doesn’t go all the way to the top of the sphere may be the solutions I need to use. I was hoping there was just some hidden option somewhere to deny SketchUp forming a face using softened edges or something like that but this will work. Trying out different ideas and I wonder if I had never noticed the massive flower of vertical faces forming in the past because it requires you to have a vertical line through the entire sphere which I just may not have had at the time.
Sketchup is doing no more or less than you ask it, when you create a vertical through the sphere you are joining the ends of the arcs and closing the loops. So the faces form.
Again, if you’d tell us what you are really trying to model we could probably come up with a more efficient method than what you are doing.
As said above I am cutting horizontal grooves in the circles at various heights, the .skp I uploaded had a real quick example.
Basically similar to a petanque ball.
That is a good point and may well have been what I did in the past. If I had accidentally built the sphere on its side and so all the ‘lines of longitude’ were actually meeting on the N,E,S or W corners rather than the top and the bottom. I’ve only just started playing around with the hidden geometry and so if I had made that mistake I likely wouldn’t have bee able to see it.
The method you use for making spheres makes it possible for you to make them the other way depending on which circle you choose as path and which profile.
I never make them that way, my path is always separate from my profile.
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Something like this?
Grooves are probably too large and deep. I used rings made with Follow Me to trim the sphere.
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@jsjtopping, you should create a vertical line (the length of the centerline) inside a different context as the sphere and use ‘Divide’ on that edge. Closing a seemingly close loop of edges by drawing the last edge where one or more edges is/are in a different context doesn’t force SketchUp to create a face.
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Click in séquence on the scene tabs of this SU file for ideas.
Shelves in a sphere.skp (338.5 KB)
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