Hi,
A completely new user here so please forgive my total lack of knowledge.
I have a design for a small boat which is 6m long and will be made of mainly 4mm thick plywood.
The design has been made in Freeship and exported as dfx file.
I am looking to be able to do a number of things:
1 split the 6m long panel into 3 so they can be cut out from 2.5mx1.25m plywood on a large cnc bed
2 then add a joint such as a finger joint or a puzzle joint so alignment when assembling for gluing is much easier. I will need to add say 5cm to each part and then cut in the joints.
I’ve found some videos on adding joints but I need to get the 3 parts initially.
Therefore I need to split it say into:
0 to 2.4m
2.35m to 4.8m
4.75m to 6m (some will be slightly longer due to curvature of hull sides but using that for ease)
I’ve imported the .dfx and I have managed (I think) to create the face and extrude it by 4mm.
0.4 lower inner panel sketchup.skp (288.3 KB)
I’ve attached the very simple project so far but I’m hoping someone could point me towards a video or some simple instructions on how I can smooth out the edges and also split this into the 3 lengths so I can try to work out ht esimple joints.
I suspect the original was drawn using spline curves and those have been imported as segments. You will need to redraw them something like what @DaveR has shown, choosing an appropriate number of segments in SketchUp.
Sorry, the dxf is attached. I’m clearly half witted.
I’ve checked in FreeShip and zooming in it does show those angles at the end.
I’ll see if it is possible to remove that / remodel it somehow - previously I have just taken plottings and transposed them onto the wood by hand and all curves created using a flexible thin wooden spar and drawn.
The panels then were hand cut.
The model still needs some work but I’m hoping to get a grip on this in plenty of time so I can then create a scale model to test it before running the full scale panels.
Does sketchup have the facility to create the flat panels from curved surfaces?
Freeship does this very easily giving.
Here is the outline of the project if you are interested:
The aim is for a rowing and sailing boat with a tiny cabin for overnight adventure races. Separately it also has small floats up front on outrigger beams for massive stability.
Like Steve indicated, it looks like FreeShip is drawing the curves as splines.
SketchUp represents curves as a series of straight edge segments. The more segments used, the smoother the curve will appear. It looks like you’ll need to do some redrawing in SketchUp to smooth out some of the curves. I used a Catmull Spline from Fredo6’s Bezier Spline extension to draw in the curve I showed.
There are extensions that can unfold surfaces but you should consider that in the same way SketchUp represents curves with line segments, it represents curved surfaces with a sieries of flat faces. The more and smaller the faces, the smoother the curved surface will appear. This works pretty well for most things but it won’t create the really nice panel developments that a program like FreeShip can do.
As for breaking it up, as I wrote before, I would draw in the puzzle joints while it’s still flat. This will divide the surface into three regions. You can then select one region at a time and make it a component or group. (I would make components and give them useful names like ‘panel 1 fwd’, ‘panel 1 mid’, ‘panel 1 aft’. So you can identify them. After you’ve made the components, you can open each one to edit it and use Push/Pull to extrude it to thickness.
