Profile Builder path twisting

Extensions
1

Hi y’all,

I’m having a recurring path problem in Profile Builder that’s maddening. When I build an assembly or a profile along a path, some of the path segments are arbitrarily twisted, so I have to reverse them manually afterward. Not a huge problem, except just now I’m trying to make some window molding to follow an arched window rim that I cut with the Hole tool. Even using Smart-Path Select, parts of the trim look the way I want, but other parts are flipped. This is along the edge of a hole that was made by the Hole tool, so I don’t know why the orientation is different on different segments of the arch. It looks like what happens in Blender when curve normals are misaligned. I can’t manually reverse the flipped segments, because they still come out wrong [hard to say exactly how, but the trim is corner aligned, so there is only 1 out of 4 orientations that is correct]. Even if I could fix it manually, I have a lot of identical arches to apply trim to, and I don’t want to keep dealing with this. How do I fix what looks like the path normals?

2

Please post a copy of your file. If it is too large use DropBox or similar.
Or just cut out the offending assembly and save that to a new file, and post that here (you can drag it to a reply).

Without the file, or at least a video / screen shot of how you have things setup we are all:

IMG_5031
IMG_50311920×1102 221 KB

Hopefully @Whaat will drop in and have a look and help you trouble shoot.

3

Thanks, bmike!

I hate to be the wolf-crying boy, but I just tried it again and it works fine. After spending an hour late last night with no luck. I didn’t even close SU, just put my laptop to sleep and now it works.

Generally speaking, how do I determine/set which way line direction/normals are facing? I know how to do it in Blender, but I don’t know how SU does it. Or how to visualize such things.

4

Viewing and changing the direction of a curve in SketchUp

5

Thanks, Mihai! I have those tools, I just didn’t know how to use them. Now I have an idea how to start tinkering with curves.