Please see attached Sketchup file.
The issue is the lines that are created where I joined 2 arcs together. They are coming out in the model.
I made an arc. Made a second arc to create the “wave” pattern.
Copied those arcs and placed copy near originals.
Joined them with line tool on both ends.
Pull up.
And there’s the line!
How can I either remove that line or do this a better way?
Thanks for any help!
Edit…You might have to zoom WAY in . Its a small model. Also select all unhide all. I have the lines hidden with eraser tool but that did NOT make them go away when I printed it lol
After running Push/Pull, you can soften the edges.
I don’t see the lines you are referring to, though. It turns out you hid them which works, too. Due to the way the curves are, softening would be better.
If by “print” you mean 3D-print in physical form, then SketchUp’s visual “smoothing” feature (which visually blends the apparent surface gradients across hard edges) is irrelevant. The physical printed model will reveal all faceting that exists in the model’s geometry. If you want to approximate what a 3D-printed version would look like, I suggest un-smoothing all the edges. You want SketchUp to show you the faceting, which the 3D-printed model would posses.
(SketchUp’s “softening” feature suppresses a visible line drawn for an edge, basically the same as SketchUp’s “Hide” feature applied to the edge. Softening has no effect on the shading or blending of surface areas.)
Edited to add a sample of a circle pulled up into a cylinder, then all edges set to soft and unsmoothed (the style has profile enabled, so that the silhouette edge of the model is shown).
I just printed it again with softened edges and yes the lines are still there.
So now I am back to the original question. I don’t want to hide or soften the lines, I want the lines gone for the print.
If you delete the lines you won’t have the faces. SketchUp uses a series of short line segments to represent curves and that just the way it is. You can choose to use more segments when you create the arcs and that will help to created a smoother appearance but the lines will still be there.
The faceting cannot be eliminated in SketchUp. SketchUp cannot draw actual curves, it can only approximate them with short straight line segments. As @DaveR says, you can minimize the visible and tactile nature of the faceting by creating the arcs or other curves with more numerous smaller straight line segments. Depending on the printer and material, this would probably go a very long way to making the curved surfaces be fairly smooth to the eye and touch. The model complexity would grow dramatically but with something that is overall fairly simple such as this, a 10X increase in model complexity shouldn’t cause much of a concern.
You may be able to increase the segment-count of the various arcs that form the outlines of the S-shaped features, without having to start from scratch. Use Push-Pull to push the upper faces of each of the S features back down flush with the flat main surface. This action should leave the 2D outline of each S shape. Then select each arc in an outline, and open the Entities Info window. There will be a Segments text field. Hopefully you can edit that number to increase it. Do that for each of the arcs comprising the outline of an S shape, to give them more segments. Then Push-Pull the S outline up again to create the raised feature.
Do the same for the other S-shape instances, or delete their outlines and array-copy (using Move and Option/Alt) the initial S feature to duplicate it as desired.
Using your tip I was able to change each of the 4 original arcs from 12 to 17 segments.
I think the line will still be seen in the printed model.
I think what I want is to draw this “S” curve in one continuous line instead of joining 2 arcs.
I don’t know if that’s possible other then freehand. And my hand is too shakey for that…
The visual line or shading discontinuity seen in the SketchUp viewport would disappear, but that is not the issue. Whether or not the facet edges are rendered as visible lines or as shading discontinuities has no bearing on a 3D print. The 3D shape produced by SketchUp consists of flat surfaces. The smoothness of a 3D print of a SketchUp model depends entirely on the actual 3D geometry, not any rendering properties. If the angular delta between two adjacent flat surfaces is small enough (probably less than one degree or so) then the human eye and fingertip would perceive there to be essentially a continuous curved surface across what is actually a discontinuous surface joint. That’s the best that can be done with a SketchUp model. To achieve very small deltas between adjacent flat facets, the “curves” that represent the outline of the overall shape need to be composed of very many short straight segments (dozens or even hundreds of them depending on radius and angular extent of the curve).
Or the adjacent arcs are not tangent with each other (maybe that’s what you mean?). If they are tangent, then dividing the arcs into a large number of segments (50? 100?) would yield a very small angle between the last face of one arc and the first face of the other arc (similar to the angular deviation between the faces of a single arc). But if the arcs are not tangent, then even with a huge number of segments in each arc the two touching faces will have a disjoint angle.
