SketchUp Shop Challenges - What am I doing wrong?

[DaveR]

@RedHatJef

Arc and circle segments result in a bad user experience for me.
a. I work in millimeters on 3d printed parts that are no bigger than 200x200x200. I’ve hit this bug a number of times - I go to make an arc and it fails and says “too many segments.” Then I need to re-cast the arc until I discover the magical number of max segments SketchUp will allow, trying and re-trying until it’s happy.
b. It’s not obvious to me where in the arc creation sequence I have to hit the “change number of segments” buttons (which I can never remember and are not labeled as far as I can tell). It’s unclear why it just doesn’t default to a workable number of segments just like circle does - which seems to automatically figure itself out.
c. When creating a circle, why doesn’t it default to “max number of segments possible?” I find myself almost always zooming in to increase a circle from something like 24 to 48.
d. Setting number of segments can fail silently. I have to zoom way in to see that my changes took effect because it can and often does fail silently - it’ll accept my 48 in the UI but the actual number of segments doesn’t change.

It’s not a bug. The thing you are butting heads with here is when you get too many segments in a small arc or circle, the points effectively merge due to the tolerances set in the software. The reason for telling you that you’ve chosen too many sides for the arcs/circles is to prevent you from creating models that can’t be printed because they aren’t watertight. The easy solution to this is to work in meters instead of millimeters. You enter all of your dimensions as if they are milleters but units are set to Meters. STL files are unitless so it really makes no difference that the units are set to meters. Tell the slicer software that the units are millimeters when you import the STL file.

Additionally, you may not need as many sides in arcs and circles as you are setting. Depending on the printer and the application, you might be able to get by with fewer sides.

This solves your issue in #4 as well.

@RedHatJef

Follow me fails with no explanation at times. Best way to see this is to create a part at large scale with a curve. Scale it down. Try to “follow me” on the curve. It seems to fail quite a bit - it’s like SketchUp can’t figure out how to follow that number of segments once you scale it down. It’s most often a curved surface that just doesn’t exist - follow me clearly creates the top and bottom but fails at curves.

Show an example. Is it because you are working at such a tiny size and maxing out the number of segments? If so, my solution above will sort that out.

Here’s a quick example. The model was created using meters as the units.

I exported the STL from SketchUp, uploaded it to i.Materialise telling them the units are millimeters. No need to scale the model down before exporting.