Push-Pull combined with rotation?

This Program is so sophisticated yet it seems to miss this feature (or this group of features) where you push/pull something (or copy or whatever) and rotate it at the same time (like here).

Or am I just missing something?

You seem to be missing the point that SketchUp’s design brief is to supply a small set of capable and very powerful tools that will work for a wide variety of users. The program is also designed to allow users to write plugins and extensions that expand the toolbox. This makes it possible for each user to customize their installation of SketchUp with the tools they need.

It is certainly possible to create a shape like the one in your image with native tools (you need to look beyond Push/Pull) or you can install plugins or extensions that will give you other ways to do that.

Learn to use the basic tools fluently and then decide on what additional tools you really need.

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I don’t know why you’d want a tool that both push-pulls and rotate instead of just using push pull and then rotate. There are about 33 tools currently in Sketchup. If you’d add a new tool for each combination of any two existing tool there would be about 559 tools in total.

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Oh I must have expressed it unclear. The picture shown has curvature to the edges, when I push pull a hexagon and then rotate it, the edges connecting the top and bottom face will just be straight lines instead of curved. Do you know what I mean?

The extrusion in the image has straight edges. You can do that by extruding upward for the first section, rotate the top face a few degrees and then repeat the process.

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Hm, yes. But as soon as I would want to repeat that for say 100 times in small increments I’d have to go and write a script for that, right?

A plugin could make it easier.

This is with Push/Pull and Rotate

To make a hundred is a few seconds more. Still with only native tools. I only added the Move tool to the mix.

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You can make the process much faster by repeated doubling:

  1. create a few levels in the way @DaveR showed
  • make a group from them
  • move a copy of the group vertically so its bottom aligns with the top height of the original group
  • rotate the copy so its bottom corners line up with the top of the ones below
  • explode the group and its copy then make a new group of the whole set of layers
  • repeat steps 3-5. Each time, the number of layers doubles, so you very rapidly get to large numbers

Unless you are a real ace programmer or need to create a lot of these with different parameters, doing it using doubling will take a lot less time than creating a plugin!

I did something similar to what @slbaumgartner described although no groups to make or explode.

for the second one, I made four levels which was enough rotation to get top and bottom vertices to align. Then I copied those four (without the bottom face) up and made 24 additional copies of the first lot of four.

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Hey just one more question, I did something like that for a model I needed.
After I was done I found that I cannot just delete the edges where 2 parts touch (the horizontal ones). I guess I don’t really need to do so in order to print, but would it be possible to just delete them? If so, how?

You can’t delete the edges because they are needed to define the edges of the faces. You could soften or hide the edges, though. Select the edges and use Edit>Hide or right click on the selected geometry and choose Soften/Smooth. Adjust the Soften slider if needed.

Here I softened the edges.

You don’t want to delete them, as the adjacent faces are not coplanar - deleting will kill the faces too. Just hide them.

If you already have an extrusion made from push pull I think the Fredo Scale plugin can twist it to achive this result in just one additional step.

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This plugin seems to do what is being proposed however I am having difficulty getting it to work in SU17.

I have used the FollowAndRotate (aka Follow Me and Rotate?) plugin a few times. I found it very handy but also very finicky. I have never been sure exactly how to control it to yield what I want without a fair amount of trial-and-error. More often than not the resulting geometry is a wild explosion. It seems to depend on the directionality of the extrusion path, and/or the facing of the polygon to extrude, or something. When I somehow get everything done in order (or whatever) the result is exactly what I wanted and very handy.

For example here is a simplified steel stranded cable formed by a snowflake-shaped polygon extruded along a curving path:

Another usability issue, if I recall correctly: after “completion” it seems there is a thread still running and consuming CPU usage. So I got into the habit of quitting SketchUp after using it each time.

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Where can I find that plugin?

Do you know where I can find this plugin?

https://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=13014&start=150

It still won’t work with SU17 though

That’s a shame.
Regardless, thank you a lot!

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