After a little research I’ve managed to create something that contains only quads that resembles a stool kind of shape. After realising what were required to do that, the plot thickened and I ended up using Quad Face Tools and Vertex Tools to help along the way. It isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a start…
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I’ve been involved in and heavily inspired by some of the stuff going on in Out of the Box lately, mainly involving spirals of sorts and the True Bend extension.
Although Spirix is more than capable, I thought I’d attempt a 360 deg helix with the “True Bend” and Curve Maker" extensions to see how that panned out. The main difficulty I had were getting the ends to align with Follow Me. I couldn’t get a perfect result whichever way I seemed to try and ended up manually fixing the join using the Line tool and softening the edges.
It was only fractionally out and I suppose you would never notice without having a really close look. Things like that do bug me though, I’ve attached a file with an explanation for anyone that’s interested or has any thoughts…
TRUEBEND HELIX COIL.skp (3.0 MB)
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A few SUBD dice renders, I applied 0.10 crease factor to all the edges to hold the cube a little more square…
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A few more SUBD concept dice thrown on the table.
Quite amusing, I were just sat back waiting for the second render to finish and my daughter walked over. “Why has that dice got 7 spots on one side?” she asked. “That’s a good question, a very good question” I replied!
I’ve been making 7 spots and copying them to all the faces, then just deleting the spots not required for the side. Then forgot to delete the middle one for the six side, talk about “dicing” with embarrassment. Problem solved. (phew)
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My son came home with this from school a couple of weeks ago, I’d never seen one before, but for games that use 2 dice this is a great idea.
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Making music with SketchUp 2019.
While doing this I suddenly realised that scenes can now be renamed by the context menu on the scene tabs. A little feature I’ve always thought would be useful.
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An agency worker Trevor approached me this morning and said “everyone I ask about this has told me you’ll help me Ian”. (thanks guys 
)
His son is one of those “Fortnite” people and wants a “loot chest” building to put in his bedroom. Trevor doesn’t really have any making experience and wants it to be easy to do. I said I’ll have a think and just ran away with my coffee.
I don’t know how good or authentic looking he wants the thing so I’ve come up with a first prototype to show him curtesy of SketchUp. The shape is symmetrical and the segmentation of Arcs really helped with the simple approach that I think will do the job and stays simple too without any curving of the slats.
I think the bandings will be easy enough to do with metal strip. It needs a lock design thinking about and hinges adding later too. I’ll see what he thinks, but I can see me getting dragged further into this one…
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Wouldn’t painted wood be an option too?
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By that you mean into that chest? Forget about putting a lock option on it first, before you let that happen.
(sadly it would probably mean the end of “IanT’s Experimental Gallery”)
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I started thinking that way, it would probably be a good way to do it. I think you could bandsaw the front and back strip to shape from a single piece. As for the lid ones, because of the width of board required, I think to bandsaw it, then it would be in two pieces. Carefully joined it would be a nice finish.
Alternatively, maybe lots of smaller individual strips cut from thin lathes, but more joining. That’s my bits of thought on that part anyway.
Nope, further into the making of chests shananigans, which is actually holding my interest. But, by the size of Trevor I reckon he’d be more than capable of folding me up and sticking me inside it.
My Dad doesn’t do computers and certainly not SketchUp, but if he did I reckon it might end up a bit like this… A BIT O TRUEBEND.pdf (295.7 KB)
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After watching SketchUp live “Toy Story” last night, I thought I’d have a go at modeling Forky myself for a bit of random SubD/Vertex practise. I used pretty much the same process as Aaron, but for the pipe cleaner I used an array of edges made into a component and then used Copy Along Curve extension to produce the rest of the pipe cleaner. It aint very pretty and I think it could have done with looking fuller, but I guess there’s plenty of other ways to produce something like that too.
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Some simple woodscrew components I’ve been figuring lately. Create a stack of the center thread component between the tip and head to achieve the desired length screw. Explode the lot and then make a new component which is a single solid. They’re not accurate in thread design as far as woodscrews go, but using just native tools gives a nice representation that’s simple to create new lengths from.
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Is a screw made up of peaks or valleys? Yours is the inverse of mine 
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I never really thought about it, I just cut a rotation of the thread at the full width above the taper on the bottom and carried on from there. Then cut the top taper to suit the rest. Our components won’t be immediately compatible that’s for sure.
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I’ve used this method for screws, bolts, vise screws and hinges like @cotty does. It works quite well. Some years ago I did a blog post on the adjustable screw. I’m normally not concerned about them being solid so I don’t explode them. If I need a different length than I already have, I can quickly adjust the length.
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