Or ‘context’ issue. With SketchUp, you basically draw edges. When these edges form a closed loop and are in the same plane, SketchUp adds a face. That’s it. If you pull up a face, it will create more edges and faces. The human mind recognizes a ‘cube’ or shape, but the software doesn’t. It still sees only edges and faces. Unless you group them to isolate.
So running Solid Inspector on the model would spot stray edges or internal faces and missing ones.
A message in the solid inspector displaying the context would be nice, for not everyone has the entity panel open, all the time.
Still trying to sort out this concept (nested instances). So I start with simple geometry (rectangle). Entity info confirms it is a solid group (first image). I run SI2, it reports “Nested Instances” (second image). Can a solid group have nested instances or is this contradictory, image 3, clearly says no? What am I missing or doing wrong?
I don’t know how else to say it, if you don’t select anything and run SI2 it will read the entire model as a group and see your unselected solid as an instance nested within the group that is the model.
Don’t use SI2 without first selecting something.
A solid is a watertight container, got it. If I apply a material or color to the solid, that does not affect the integrity, right? Does it make a difference if the material or color is applied to the surface only or to the face in edit mode?
It is best to apply materials directly to faces so you can position them if necessary, wood grain for example needs to be on the face if you want to rotate to follow the length of the wood. Solid colours can be painted on the whole group/component if you want.
A material on a face will override a material on a group/comp. So if you paint one face of a cube red then paint the group green, the red face will stay red.
Correct. Materials or colors have no effect on the “solidness” of the geometry they are applied to. You could apply a 100% transparent material to a solid shape and have an invisible solid.
