Prevent pulling voids

I made a drawing of Animal (the Muppets) in SketchUp. I now want to make it 3D so I can print it. However, when I start pulling several faces it will automatically pull a void as explained here:
http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/94890.
However, that’s not what I want to happen, I simply want different heights for the different faces, but all having the same base. How am I to do this?

I’m not sure I follow your problem. When you have a smaller Face drawn on the interior of a larger Face and you pushpull the smaller one into the larger one, it will create a void. But if you pull the Face away from the larger one, it should extrude outward. As a guess, are you pulling the larger Faces up before the inset ones? If so, try doing it in the opposite order. If you can’t figure it out, upload the model here so we can see exactly what you are dealing with.

What I mean is, that when I pull up the smaller face in the model, it will not extrude, but it will leave a hollow underneath the face. If you open the model attached and you try to extrude the ‘teeth’ outwards it will become hollow underneath the teeth. What I want is to simply have an entirely solid object with a flat bottom but different heights on the different face, so I want to create some different levels without any hollows whatsoever. I hope it’s more clear this way.

Animal.skp (1.2 MB)

Gotcha. You need to press ctrl (option on Mac) while doing the pushpull to tell SketchUp to create a new starting Face. Look closely at the status bar to see special keypresses for SketchUp Tools.

Be wary when using [ctrl] that all your geometry remains with outside faces on the outside and inside faces on the inside. I find that it occasionally flips. (use the “monochrome” view to check)

The alternative is simply to draw a line connecting two points on the face that has been left blank - it will join the dots and re-generate the face, then the line can be deleted again. Sometimes there is less ‘fallout’ doing this than when you duplicate the face.

Look a bit further and you’ll find this article:
Push/Pull Tool: Creating a new Push/Pull starting face — SketchUp Help


SketchUp Training Series: Push Pull Tool