I am a swimming pool contractor and am trying to use Sketchup to draw pools for sales presentations and then create construction drawings. I CANNOT find any curves in order to draw free form swimming pools. There are arcs that similar tools, but they are too severe my needs.
I am on the free trial as of Monday (14SEP2015) to evaluate it and see if it will meet my needs.
Help!
Please and thank you.
I’d wait for more experts than me, but since it’s late in the day, I’ll open with Sandbox tools: go to youtube and search for SketchUp Sandbox on:youtube to get started.
there’s a bezier line extension available at the extension warehouse…
john
I would recommend Fredos BezierSpline plugin.
With some practice and the “Tangent at Vertex” inference it is possible to draw any curved contour only with the arc tool too.
To expand slightly on @Cotty’s response:
The plugins that have been referenced will certainly super-charge the drawing of curves (once you have traversed their learning curves), but even if you’re just using the homely little Arc tool, it’s not very difficult to fit just about any curve.
It’s best to keep the arcs short and with very few segments–maybe even as few as three per. If you consistently use Tangent inferencing when you join arcs end-to-end, the result will be reasonably smooth. Also, if necessary, you can use the Scale tool to skew arcs along the axes to find a fit.
It’s important to try keeping the spacing of endpoints as uniform as possible along the length of the fitted curve. You can use Entity Info to change the number of segments on an arc unless it’s already been stretched.
The bezier curve plugins have enhanced capabilities regarding spacing of endpoints, but it may come down to convenience and personal preference as to whether you prefer the native tools or plugins. In any event, it never hurts to have a solid foundation in the native tools before moving on to plugins to replace them.
-Gully
I’m often using Fredos Curvizard plugin to generate an “angle optimized” curve out of the different arc segments afterwards…
Arc tool followed by using the Move tool on the arc entity cardinal points:
https://sites.google.com/site/sketchupsage/sages/files/catamountain/Kidney%20bean.gif?attredirects=0
After getting the contour, adjust the arc segmentation by selecting each arc and changing the segment count in the Entity Info window (open from the Window menu).
More on this tutorial.
I’ve always used Fredo’s Bezier Spline to do this.
“BZ - Convert to”
something like “Catmull Spline” or “F-Spline”.
As though they work, but i think using Curvizard is a bit more effective way of doing this.
Thanks for the post Cotty.
How do you depict curves in your current method of producing construction drawings?
Bezier curves are pretty, but I wonder if such curves can be recreated easily and accurately in the field without certain modern equipment.
Trimble Layout Solutions for General Contractors
http://www.trimble.com/construction/layout_CG_contractors.aspx
In the case of a pool the follow me tool may not be best tool given the sloping bottom.
After the profile is done - whether by Arcs or bezier curve - you can still take advantage of the cardinal points/control nodes to shape a 3D model as long as the entity properties remains intact. Below each Push/Pull extrusion was uniformly scaled by scaling along the diagonal. Scale+Shift will scale uniformly using any scale node. If the arc has been deformed in such a way that the cardinal point properties stop working, the polyline edges can be selected and the Scale and/or Move tool used instead. And there’s always the Smoove (+Shift if needed) tool from the Sandbox extension.
https://sites.google.com/site/sketchupsage/_/rsrc/1442732297896/sages/files/catamountain/Push%20kidney.gif?attredirects=0
More on this kidney bean model. After Kidney Bean is an example that used the first bezier plugin to make a profile instead of the Arc tool.
