Solid tools/intersect and hidden geometry

SketchUp Pro
1

Hi!

When I use solid tools, for example if I subtract a cylinder from a cube, sketchup will create a bunch of hidden geometry which means I can’t push/pull entire surfaces.

Often, it I erase the hidden geometry, it will create a gap in the face. These gaps are easy enough to repair manually, but if I have a surface with 20 cylinders cut out of it, the gaps become much more difficult to repair.

The real issue is that the planes created by the hidden geometry appear to no longer be coplanar, which doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.

Is there perhaps a plug-in that can erase all those hidden line segments and leave me with a clean face? Or just something fundamental I’m not understanding about what’s happening here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

2

If the objects are very small and/or you have a cylinder mades of lots of edges, then the accuracy at which sketchup can operate is not good enough and that can knock those kinds of things out of whack.

Try the same subtraction, but scale up your model first and see if that works better.

3

Thanks for the quick reply!

Scaling up certainly does help, but even scaling to 1000x is not enough to eliminate the problem. And unfortunately this is the sort of thing I need to do very often.

4

Have you got an example of something where this is happening?

A little test skp you can share here.

5

Gimme a few minutes and I’ll do exactly that. Thanks!