Removing edges also removing face

Hello there! When I remove an adge I get a face also removed, as shown in the attached image. Why does this happens, and how do I do to remove the edge keeping the face?

Thanks in advance!!!

This is not a direct answer to the question. The Learning Center will give you a good grasp of the basics needed to use the software. Sketchup Fundamentals is a great tutorial.

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You have to think of the way SU works as a bit like a soap bubble. Remove the edge and you lose the “skin”. SU is a surface modeller so it’s always trying to create faces. Try drawing three lines in any direction in 3 dimensions such that the last line joins back up with the start of the first, creating a triangle. Whatever angle that triangle is to the vertical and horizontal, a surface will be created.

You can select a surface and delete it leaving the edges in place but you can’t do the reverse. There is a workaround though. You can hide edges so that it looks as if there is no bounding edge. But if you turned on Hidden Geometry you would see that the line is still there.

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There is also a technical gotcha: every face in SketchUp must be planar. If you delete an edge that is between two non-coplanar faces, both of them will disappear.

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Another answering aproach:
Think of each SketchUp face as a sheet of paper. The paper “consists” of a front and a back face and has edges. It can’t exist without its edges. So can’t a SketchUp face exist without its edges around it.

In SketchUp however, edges can exist without a face.

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Thank you so much for your efforts to explain this, but I really couldnt realize how to fix this hehehe… I´m a newbie on Sketchup. Started to using it 5 days ago. Anyway, thank you so much for your attention

So should I make the same shape also from the bottom (upside down)?

Right. I think I got it. But I thought the outer edge would be enough. How do I fix this, removing this edge without removing the face? Im watching a lot of videos, but couldnt realize yet

Yeah. Thanks dude. Im really trying to learn. This learning center is very good, but i think it wont answer this question

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It’s not obvious what you mean by “fix”. As you can tell from the replies here, you haven’t come across a glitch. SU is working the way it is designed to and you should expect.

If what you want to do is exactly what you said in your OP, ie. remove a line and leave a face, you can’t.
It’s a bit like saying you want to remove the bottle and leave the liquid in situ. The bottle is holding the liquid in place just as SU lines hold a surface in place. The best you can do is make the bottle/line appear invisible but not actually delete it.

Removing the edge marked shouldn’t remove the face marked.
Would need to see the model to see why.

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Because the inside edges of the oval are not on the face–they show bold and so are not intersecting the face.–the deleted edges are the bounding edge of the larger face, and so it all disappears when they are removed.The area on the right side of the oval is bounded by edges that do not form a face, so removing those marked edges just opened the surface to “nothing”–so it disappears. A face must be bounded by coplanar edges.

[Correction–the edges could actually lie on the face but not completely bisect it due to a gap. Also sometimes tracing over one of the edges with the line tool may cause the faces to bisect. I just stated one possibility.]

Please post the model and also say what you are after (draw a picture?) and someone can show how to make it work in your model.

I guess you nailed the very question that wasn’t that clear in the first post.
So it might be the “bow-tie” glitch that we see once in a while where one face is actually larger than we see: it streches beyond an existing edge.
@bipenett, you need to share the model to nail your case, to get better answers.

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That´s a good one! Is there any way to make the “bold” edges intersect to the face?

The bold part was created from a circle that I resized until reach the oval shape. And this part was pasted there (not originaly created in that area)

It would be much easier to answer your questions if you’d share the SketchUp file with us.

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It may be as simple as moving the edges to the face. Depends on the file. I don’t even know how your file is set up, but in certain settings the bold edge is a giveaway that the edges which occur within a face do not bisect it. It could be the edges are no longer parallel to the face, in which case it would be more difficult to make them lie on the face (i.e. easier to redraw). It could be there is a small gap which allows the faces each side to be one. Try tracing over a segment with the line tool.

I should correct that the edges could lie on the face but not completely bisect it due to a gap.

I think you are missing a vital concept…

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Actually the problem is that in the first step the squared plane is filled, but it loses the fillment after I remove the edge from the other objetct (the circle) ! image

That suggests there is a gap somewhere that causes the two apparent faces to actually be one. Or else (as noted earlier) you have encountered the known “bow tie” bug that links two faces into one by messing up the handling of their edges.

As has been stated multiple times, if you share the model the experts can analyze it for specific issues instead of guessing.

I don´t have the sketch anymore. Unfortunately I deleted unintenionllay. Anyways, heres another sketch with similar problem (when I remove one of the edges from the circle, it also erases the face from outside the circle).

test.skp (178.3 KB)

By the way, all I need is to extruse the squared face, but leaving the circle alone, but extrusion is also being aplied to the inner part of the circle