LOL.
Actually, I’d do it if I had more time.
Maybe it’s time to reboot? If I could figure out how to embed an image here, I’d do so, but…you probably believe me anyway…right? (Jeez…I don’t even see a way to upload an image, let alone a ‘here’s how it’s done’ GIF, or whatever they’re called!) Thanks for letting me know “it’s just me,” though.
You can upload your image using the Upload button…
…or you can drag it into the message window.
Surely there’s something amiss.
What version of SketchUp are you using? Operating system? Graphics card? Your profile is incomplete.
Dave,
I’m not feeling too swift today after some benadryl early this AM, so it’s possible/likely I’m missing something obvious. Three cups of coffee didn’t make a huge difference, either. For example, the “upload” icon - yeah, not visible to me 30 minutes ago. So my profile? I see a few “preference” items I can change, but nothing that cries out for me to enter my setup info. Where, then? Anyway, my hardware’s about to change anyway, so here’s my short-term basics:
SU2018
Win 10 point something
GTX1060
Dave S
I’m thinking I’d crawl into bed if I were you. Sleep it off.
Click on Profile and scroll down a bit.
One thing I just noticed from your GIF (or whatever…) - there seems to be some irregularity in ‘selection clicks’ (the count) and what ends up being selected. Maybe you can clean up/correct my verbiage:
- single-click on the grid: solid blue lines on all gridlines and a “group” blue rectangle around whole of grid: first level of selection
- double-click on grid: THIS is where I need to be (and apparently was two weeks ago, in order to select nodes or other entities to edit with Smoove)
- triple-click on grid: this is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of hours, 'cause I could swear that’s what I had to do last time! What’s this level of selection even called, since I guess it’s not just ‘raw geometry?’ It shows dashed blue lines over the whole grid, along with diagonals across each grid opening. I can’t quite believe I didn’t run into this previously, what with the hundred or so individual nodes I had to select, one by one, in order to enter their Z coordinate. Maybe my index finger is gaslighting me…
YES, I am SO looking forward to the end of my work-day and crashing long before dark.
Ah, the shoe drops!
Double click on the group opens it for editing which is indeed where you need to be before getting the Smoove tool.
Triple click on the group opens it for editing AND selects all of the connected geometry. You don’t want this for Smoove.
Until that Benadryl wears off, please stay away from your bulldozer. 
I’ll need to leave myself a post-it or two at the end of today. I feel like that guy in “memento…” Anyway, thanks for your patience and incredible assistance.
I just tried to get on with Part B of this - to see if I could find a way to stretch those remaining grid nodes down maybe seven, and & right a couple of feet, before setting their depths. I’m thinking it might be “close enough” to not even mess with that, and instead just enter the data as if it were really all on the same grid, but if there’s an easy way to stretch the fabric down a little, it would be better. How can I do this?
(Ultimately, I need this contoured bottom to be a continuous surface, so I can use solid-subtraction or similar method, to arrive at a theoretical volume of material to be dredged in order to reach the design depth…yes, this is stuff that should have been done when my company bid the project, but somehow wasn’t…)
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Once you have the surface shapped like you want it, triple click on it to select all of the geometry (See? You get to use the triple click.) and soften all of the geometry. Also tick Soften coplanar.
Then you could use Fredo’s Joint Push/Pull to make a solid.
From there you should be able to figure out the volume or subtract that from another solid volume.
DaveR - can you guess why it might be that using Fredo’s tool produces something that’s not…quite… a solid for me? I noticed before I “accepted” the solid that the FredoWare offered (by hitting enter, as it requires), a lot of the edges of my Sandbox were unfilled rectangles - but they all filled when I hit enter, so I don’t know what that’s about.
To use that tool, do you triple-click first? That seemed to be the only way it worked for me. (edit…and why is this text red and bold??)
In getting to this point, I ran right into the same problem I have in the past, where I’ve got an “organic” irregular surface that I want to intersect with some other surface, so as to create a new solid. I don’t think I ever finished the drawing last time this came up.
I’m inferring that the whole intent of your using Fredo’s extension was to create a solid that included the subject surface, just so as to be able to use Solid Tools to do what I wanted to do in terms of calculating a new solid volume - yes? If so, well, you got me partway there. I tried to upload the file this time, but get no confirmation that it happened, so I doubt it’s there. See not-a-solid yet.skp - Google Drive
Note also the ‘stray’-looking Sandbox mesh showing up here and there. I’d been assuming that’s where adjacent nodes happened to be at the same elevation, but no, I think there’s something else going on there. I don’t see them in your rework of the file from yesterday.
A guess is that you add the wrong option selected for Finishing. Not that you wound up with a group without a top and have another group for the terrain surface.
Select the other second Finishing option as shown below.
Even if you had done that before, you wouldn’t have a solid due to the edge segment sticking out by itself, shown selected, below. You would need to delete that.
That’s the way I’d do it. You can select faces after starting the tool but I prefer to preselect them before starting the tool and triple clicking with Select will do that.
Maybe it’s the way you are holding your mouth or something.
Yes.
They’re keeping secrets from you. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you. A conspiracy. Actually, as you can see, the file did upload and I got it.
Those edges are coplanar edges I got rid of them yesterday (and again, today) by using Soften Coplanar. Again, I triple clicked on the geometry to select it all, right clicked on it and selected Soften/Smooth. In the Soften window, I ticked the box for Soften Coplanar. The edges are really there but they are softened so they don’t show.
Dave, re: softening the edges: I’d done that in the version I sent you, some hours before I sent it. I think you can see that it’s smoother, but the offending segments are still visible…can’t recall what setting I used, somewhere in the forties. And even now when I do it, I can’t get rid of the random segments - though you clearly did - even if I go up to 180 degrees on the slider, both boxes ticked. Anything on that?
Thanks for pointing out that horizontal flagpole. Not sure how I missed that.
I’ve got a ton to figure out WRT Fredo…jeez, I can’t get that menu in your screenshot to come up the second time (I seem to recall having similar menu-navigation-confusion with some other extensions by Fredo, useful as they are). I’m virtually sure that what I must have done (several times, maybe, while messing with it and not having a clue) was to click on the ‘thickener’ icon, thus creating a second top that I later was fighting with?
The basics of this project seemed pretty do-able, but I’m feeling pretty discouraged about trimming off the solid that represents the volume to be dredged - I thought this would be the fun part. I’ll try again tomorrow - if I’m not in trouble for spending so much time on it already at the expense of boring regular tasks…
As always, thanks for your tutelage.
Hmmmm… I did see that your newer version had some softened edges. All I did, though was to triple click and tick the box.
Maybe it’s time for a cold reboot of the computer. Power all the way off and restart. I don’t know why the bar wouldn’t show up a second time. Make sure LibFredo6 is up to date.
Yeah, I think I need a reboot, too. I’m thinking next week I might start over with a new grid. Same thing might happen, or something new. But here’s the thing, as my first time using Sandbox - and maybe you know tricks to help verify that fall short of starting over - but when I thought I’d best go in to especially those nodes where there are “bones” showing up (coplanars? I don’t know) to verify that I’d gotten the node pushed down the right amount there, I found in practice it’s very difficult to check the Z measurement. The movement of the node is relative, not absolute, and I know of no other setting…Is there any means to do this on an absolute basis, or maybe determine from some ‘Tray’ data how far I’d moved that node to begin with? Though it’s scanned in as a base layer, my map of node elevations isn’t clear enough to read directly from the screen, so I had to keep looking back to the full-size hard-copy to see what any given node “Z” should have been, locating it by relation to other markings on the plan. The only way I came up with to check the actual depression depth I’d entered was to draw a triangle from some known point (the origin, say) and then check the length of the short side. Doing that for a hundred or more points would take far too long.
Since some of them came out wrong, and this might make a big difference in the required dredge-material volume, it seems like my only responsible choice is to start over, or try something completely different.
Is this “all you get” with the Sandbox tool, or is there some means to go back and verify my numerical input? Ideally, I’d be able to, say, hover over a node and read what my offset was. Seems like this would come up for anyone trying to use it with actual measurements, and not just toying with it as a cool way to create 3D surfaces organically.
Finally, it seems those stray ‘bones’ are not just showing me where adjacent nodes are the same elevation. What’s the difference between a dashed-blue-line element and a solid-blue element, do you know?