Rendering curved surfaces

Hi All,
I am relatively new to SU but I have a solid CAD background. I mainly want to design furniture and home projects. When I create a curved face it is composed of parallel lines that shows the profile but doesn’t look realistic. How can a I change this to make it look more real. I have a feeling this has a simple answer. Thanks!

SketchUp represents curves with a series of short straight edges segments. Depending on how you create the curves, you may be able to increase the number of edges segments to create smoother looking curves. You can’t get away from the short segments, though. Usually it won’t be a problem and for smaller objects, even the default number of sides in the various curves won’t be a problem.

While it might seem like you’d always want to use the maximum number of segments in curves, there are situation where you won’t want to do that.

Use the slider in the Soften/Smooth tray to hide the edges and smooth out the appearance of the faces.

You can smooth some of the lines which makes them hidden and smooth. With the erase tool, hold control key (on Windows) and drag over the lines you want to smooth. You can see them again if you want to edit them with View Menu → Hidden Geometry.

This video explains it better than me:

1 Like

Thanks! That was what I needed.

Thanks! That made more realistic curves faces. I thought it would be something simple. I just needed to know where to look.

good video that explains a lot.

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