Planes fragmenting

Hi. Every now and then sketchup breaks a plane into many fragments and do not know why or how to get rid of it. Often when I pull a floor thru a building. When you view hidden geometry you can see the lines shattering your plane

Would you be able to share a screenshot that describes your problem?

By the sound of it, you are seeing triangulated surfaces.
Did you import the model from elsewhere?

No I did not import it - this is the soffit of my first floor.

Seems like you have a problem that I cannot solve by just looking at your screenshot.

Sorry for not requesting this at the first time around, but could you upload the model for us to take a look at?

@josephkim626 is right that we would need to see the model to give a definite diagnosis, but here are a couple of possibilities. If you can delete those hidden edges and the adjacent faces join into one, they are an annoying but harmless glitch that sometimes happens when SketchUp decides during an operation that it needs to autofold the faces involved and then fails to remove the folds when the operation concludes and it turns out they weren’t necessary. But if you lose faces when you delete the hidden edges, they are a sign that there are tiny misalignments in your model that are forcing SketchUp to triangulate an area because the points aren’t coplanar.

Thanks for the trouble.

Thanks. I think you might be right - things might not be perfectly perpendicular from the dwg import that we use as a base to draw from! Any advice on how to possibly fix it in SU or is the answer to make 100% sure the import is perfect?!

There are so many ways the geometry could be subtly misaligned and so many specific situations of what you might be doing that I can’t give a general answer other than the somewhat silly “yes, of course, only import dwg’s that are perfect”. But we aren’t always the ones who created the dwg, so we can’t always demand perfection. Also, the answer varies depending on whether there are problems in the import itself or with new geometry you are drawing. We see lots of examples here in which the modeler didn’t pay close enough attention to SketchUp’s inferences while drawing.

Beyond that, it depends on just what is wrong and whether it is just a few places or is widespread. Some techniques work in bulk on a whole selected set of geometry, and others need you to focus in on a limited area that is causing a problem. Sometimes you have to zoom way in to see the cause, such as edges that don’t quite meet.

If some of the points that were supposed to be on a plane are slightly off, a plugin such as TIG’s flatten to plane may help.

You can try turning on color-by-axis for edges in your style. But be warned that it tests to within a tolerance and will color edges that may be slightly askew. Obviously, it is only useful if the suspect edges were supposed to be aligned with axes.

You can use the text callout tool to label vertices with their coordinates and see whether values are consistent (surprisingly small discrepancies can cause problems in SketchUp).

Sjoe ok thanks a lot.