I am having trouble with making a solid object

SketchUp
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1

I have been awake for fifty hours now trying to fix new holes that keep forming in my Sketchup images. I can’t print them and Solid Inspector keeps finding new problems. Can someone please help?

wrist.skp (209.9 KB)

2

I’ve recreated that part because it was faster than the repairing of the oiginal…

wrist_cotty.skp (732.3 KB)

(Edit: You should change the title of this topic because it’s not a problem of solid inspector.)

3

Thanks so much, Cotty!

I have remade this multiple times but with each tweak, things get gaps in them. Is there an easy way to fill gaps in Sketchup? Thanks for showing the steps involved too.

4

It depends on the hole… it is possible with: the line tool, Curviloft, ExtrudeTools, Sandbox tools, …

5

Of course, the best answer is to avoid creating gaps in the first place :smirk:! In your model, there were numerous edges inside the final shape that suggest you had small misalignments while placing and intersecting the two segments. Study the process Cotty showed, try it yourself, and if some aspect still causes problems for you, come back with more questions.

6

Thank you. I have been having serious issues trying to cut this shape in half - it is housing for a servo motor so the shape needs to click around the motor in 2 pieces.

I made a rectangle, then placed it in the centre of the shape, then highlighted everything, then intersected the faces, then grouped the top half, then moved it so it was by itself, but the rectangle did not fill the gaps in the middle - it was hollow.

I was having more solid inspector issues. Even with Cotty’s image, solid inspector reports no issues while the image is grouped, but if I explode Cotty’s image, solid inspector reports hundreds of issues.

I just want to slice the model into 2 pieces. Can someone please tell me why I’m having problems with this method?

1028×958 25.9 KB

This is what Cotty’s stl file looks like when opened in Slic3r. I had to resize it from Metres to Millimetres in sketchup because it caused memory issues in NetFabb and was being arbitrarily resized in Slic3r to fit, which also might have caused hundreds of new errors. All 3D prints I have made have ignored the correct scale. The correct scale in the print is vital.

7

I had no issues cutting it in half, so you must be doing something wrong.

  • draw a vertical rectangle larger than the wrist, oriented the way you want to split the wrist
  • move it over until it passes through the center of the wrist
  • delete the rectangle
  • open the wrist Group for edit
  • paste in place
  • do Intersect Faces with->Context
  • erase the extra geometry on one side of the rectangle, also erase the part of the rectangle outside the wrist

I tried to upload the result, but for some reason that isn’t working for me just now…

8

I used basically the same approach as Cotty outlined above. When I split it in half, I got one half that was identified as a solid and the other half not. However, when I exported them as an STL file, they loaded into MakerBot just fine:

638×689 56.3 KB

I think the area circled in red (below) may be causing SketchUp not to recognize it as a solid. This is where two boundaries cross and several surfaces meet at that point:

I also switched the model units to mm and turned off the snap-to option which may explain @slbaumgartner’s observation:

Not knowing for sure the target height, I arbitrarily made the overall dimension 25mm by scaling the model down.

wrist_jh.skp (98.0 KB)

9

Thanks. The rectangle never cut out anywhere until I intersected faces with context.

10

Thanks so much for your in-depth observations. Very generous people here. And thanks for remaking the model. So much effort :smile:

11

Here’s a way with s4u-slice ($) and my uploaded model. Both parts are recognized as solids afterwards…

12

Thanks so much Cotty. I’ll print this and probably download and pay for that plugin :slight_smile: