I use sketchup for garden design and when I import plants as components they pass through surfaces such as fences and show on the other side. I want to prevent this so that when the component hits the fence it is “cut off” at that point. As you can imagine I only want to do this with selected faces.
I thought I could do this by making the fence a solid object but it doesn’t seem to do it this way.
Any ideas?
(I would describe myself as a competent but definitely not expert SU user!)
You can modify each group / component of that plant that intersects a certain object (fence, wall, window …) as you want, by moving vertices. In the case of components, make sure they are unique beforehand.
No collision detection and automatic bending/cutting.
“Solids” in SketchUp don’t mean what you expect. They are actually the surface skin of what you might think of as a real-world solid. But unlike the real-world one, there is nothing inside. Further, SketchUp solids can pass through each other without interaction; there is no collision detection or overlap prevention.
For a simpler object you would use edit->intersect with or a solid tool to cut off the part that would stick through. That will also work for a more complex object such as a plant, with numerous stems, leaves, flowers, etc. - but it will take a long time and may encounter issues with small edges (search the forum for “the Dave method”). If the plants are distinct, you might be able to use section planes to achieve the appearance of the trim.
Hi , thanks to both of you for those tips. It seems from your answers that it would require that I prevent the plant passing through the fence,rather than making the fence prevent the plant going through it. Is that correct? I think adjusting each plant would be highly time consuming, whereas if I could make the fence “solid” in the real world sense, that would be much simpler.
As Steve wrote, there’s no collision detection or any method of prevent the plant from passing through the wall. You would need to cut the plant component off. This could be very time consuming indeed but it’ll get the job done since there is no way to make the “fence “solid” in the real world sense.”
If you add the extension Zorro it adds ‘Slice Model at Section’ into the section plane context menu, so it would chop off the extraneous foliage like a pair of secateurs rather than just hide it. You can then remove the section plane. This would be a permanent cut, so if you think you might move the plants, stick with just the section plane.
