This Solid Inspector is a cousin of the desktop extension Solid Inspector2 from ThomThom (thanks also to Anders Lyhagen for his significant contribution). The feature was released in SketchUp for Schools last fall to aid students and educators as they prepare projects for 3D printing.
We think Solid Inspector will help improve the quality of STL exports for 3D printing, but it can also be useful for cleaning up model geometry in general. Inspecting and repairing models is not an exact science, but utilities like Solid Inspector or CleanUp can point towards errors/optimizations that can be hard for people to find on their own.
If you have subscribed to SketchUp, we’d love to hear what you think about Solid Inspector in SketchUp for Web. What kinds of modeling errors are you finding most difficult to understand or deal with? What kinds of models make it hard to see where your problematic geometry is located? We’re eager for your feedback!
Looks good to me. I also noticed it was harder to create a small sphere using Follow Me that has holes in it in SketchUp Shop than it is in the Desktop client version.
Is this a Shop and Schools feature or is it included in SketchUp Free, too.
This feature is already in SketchUp for Schools, yes. It’s not available for Free subscribers. As you know, Entity Info gives you a very basic / binary indication of model solidity.
If this was implemented in C/C++, then it would be nice for Pro license holders (of whatever flavor) to have this feature native to the desktop edition as well. (ie, a button on the Boolean Tools toolbar.)
I think this should be launched from Entity Info rather than be a separate inspector. One of the few things I like about the web version is the inspector cleanup (although some things are obviously misplaced, like smooth/soften edges which are properties of the selected entities, not model wide rendering options as is suggested by having them under Display).
With that said I think this in the long run should be an extension, not a native feature. SketchUp’s modular architecture and ability to filter out everything but the fundamentals is one of the things that makes it stand out. Sure, it could be a shipped extension, but not with a visible toolbar until the user chooses to display it.
Also, some trivial cases of border holes could perhaps be made to be automatically fixed? If the loop formed of naked edges is planar, a face could be generated from it.
