Making screens/ limits of solid tools

SketchUp
1

Hi everybody. I am working on drawing a seat for a cafe. One of the the details requested on this was a woven rattan panel (you know, the one you saw a lot in the 80’s?). So I ran into problems trying to draw it, and started researching. I see that there are workarounds to making lattice-type elements with lattice making plug-ins or by using a .png file. Those both sounded good, but I assumed they would take just as much time to learn or use as it would to solve my original problem. Well, in the end, I convinced myself to give up on drawing that because that type of thing doesn’t belong in a cafe anyway.
This left me with a couple of nagging questions though. In trying to draw this panel, I wanted to make it be one object, so that I could duplicate it and trim it for the sides. I made a bunch of slats and tried to do outer shell, but this made the computer hang up. I tried other alternatives (which I don’t want to write out), but the one that started to work went like this: I selected two slats and did outer shell which worked fine. I then selected the new object and another slat, hit outer shell, and that worked fine too. I kept doing this, and eventually got the message, “one of the objects is either locked or not a solid”. What gives? is there a limit to what solid tools can handle? The file isn’t really that big. Anyone ever run into this?

Newer 1:2" Rattan Mesh.skp (1.3 MB)

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The best and easiest method would be to use a PNG image as a texture. With a PNG, you can make the space between the strips of rattan transparent.

Creating all the geometry for this can be done but it will be tedious at best and with your integrated graphics card, the huge amount of geometry you’d need to create would likely stop your computer in its tracks.

Here’s an example of using a texture.

2 Likes
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Thank you for that. I think that’s what I will go with for now. Do you have any thoughts on why I encountered the warning that I got though? Is there a limit to what solid tools can handle?

4

I didn’t look at your file but typically when you run into things like that, it’s due to the geometry being way too small. You could try scaling up by a factor of 100 or even 1000 and try it.

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Thats probably what the problem was then- each piece was 3/16"x1/16" x length. Thanks for clearing that up!

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Yeah. Too small.