Model Errors Detected on Cura

Mari’s Pyramid.skp (96.7 KB)

Hi Wonderful Sketchup Community,

I am struggling to find the model Errors on this pyramid model. I recognize my ceiling on the top level required a few “lines” to complete the face, but I am unsure why they are required. I also know that two supports have errors but have not figured out why.

Thanks in advance!
Michael

Hi Michael. Happy New Year. Your student did a good job of cleaning this up from the last time you shared it but still a little more to do. X-ray is you friend here. There are some internal faces at the bottom and a couple of overlapping faces at the top as well as the stray edges like Box points out.

You can see the subtle different in color where there

A diagonal in one corner creates an internal face, too.

Solid Inspector is a quick way to clean it up but as Box also indicated, theree’s no much to do to fix it manually by removing the faces and edges that aren’t required.

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Hi Dave,

Thanks for the kind response. I am still learning and using the “Free Sketchup” model, with many tools like “Solid Inspector” hidden (I am not sure it is even available on this free version) makes it more difficult to support the 56 students I get to teach in a 9 week course. With the free version, how might I find these errors more quickly? Again, thanks for your thoughtful and gracious response.

Sincerely,
Michael

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Hi Michael. I was under the impression that SketchUp for Schools has Solid Inspector but I might be wrong. Unfortunately I can’t access SketchUp for Schools to be able to check personally. Maybe @CaseyG can confirm.

So without Solid Inspector, change the style to Xray is one way. It does take a little practice to discern the difference in shading that identifies the internal faces. other ways would be to temporarily hide external faces so you can see inside.

I don’t know if you can turn off Section Fill in SketchUp for Schools. If you can, adding a section without fill will allow you to see inside. You can see a lot of internal faces here, for example.


Selecting and deleting those faces will be important.

Remember that in order to be considered a solid, every edge must be shared by exactly two faces. Now fewer and no more. When you have internal faces, there are more than two sharing an edge. For example the edge I show selected here is shared by three faces; one to the left, one to the right, and one below.

The trick is to prevent those from occurring to begin with or be able to go after them and remove them if they occur.

Thanks for the @ DaveR. I appreciate it. DaveR is correct as usual that the best way to clean things up is to use solid inspector or better yet, not to make the errors in the first place. he is also correct that the edu version has a built in solid inspector. I also ran a quick test to make sure it is working correctly and all seems to be well on that front.

If you need help cleaning up student models I am happy to walk you through the process of using the solid inspector in the edu version but if you are restricted to the free version, it will need to be done manually.

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One thing I noticed about the ceiling of the top level (the capstone) is that this doesn’t seem to be a perfectly flat face.


Notice the tilde “~” by the measurement in the upper right corner? That means the measurement is not exactly 1 13/16". It’s off by a measurement smaller than your settings will display.

This may be a little hard to see, but I made some measurement lines on the underside of the capstone. Your angles aren’t perfectly square with one another, which can probably be traced back to one of your legs being a little longer on one vertex than it should be.
I wish I had better news or could offer you a quick and easy solution, but these modeling errors run pretty deep.

Hi Sketchup Community,

The pyramid is created without errors now. I appreciate all the kind support today. With “Free Sketchup” I am learning that the measuring tool from a line face that is "acceptable allows me to create more lines to be acceptable and therefore make more faces acceptable. I also like that the “hide” tool and select tool allowed me to try to eliminate extra faces. I am a work in progress and I see that trying to convince my district to allow at least one paid Sketchup license will allow me to detect errors much sooner.
Again, thanks for your patience with me and your examples to lead me out of the errors:)

Sincerely,
Michael

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