I am quite new to 3D modeling and this software seemed very approchable for newbies. I gave myself a challenge of reverse engineering a part of a medical device. I got suprisingly far with it, but somewhere along the way I made a mistake and don’t have a backup file I could revert to. Now I am faced with a problem of patching sidewalls of holes I made thorugh 2 curved surfaces. I tried loading stl model (as is) into my slicer software but it doesn’t compute it right.
I would love if you could give me some pointers, how to get around this as elegantly as possible.
If you spend some time at The Learning Center, you will learn how to use the tools to get what you want. (interactive tutorials) Also, go to The SketchUp YouTube Channel and pay attention to the Square One series. Both are sponsored by the SketchUp Crew and well worth the time spent there.
Thank you Jean, nicely demostrated how it should be done. I went and re-done it the right way, some edges weren’t perfectly imprinted on the surface but I managed to fix those. Now I am stuck with one little task of deleting the face of one of the holes but whatever I try I cannot seem to separate that face from the whole curved surface, edge is visible on the face but it doesn’t want to separate those faces nor weld that edge in one piece.
Show hidden geometry and you will see that, along the perimeter of the face that you want to remove, there are very short edges that can cause problem. SU has difficulties closing a face that has sub millimeter edges.
Try redoing this model with less segmentations in the arcs and you shall have less problem.
Or, use the Dave’s method by making a component of your model, copying it aside, scaling the copy up by 100, for example, and then working on the copy.
When done, you will discover that the original unscaled component will be OK.
See attached SU file and read all the texts that I put there to point you to possible improvements with the file as it is now.
