Specify precise circle properties

SketchUp
1

I have been leaning SketchUp for about a week for the intent of 3D printing. I have not discovered the answer to this question:

I have done a bit of searching, including on this forum, google and YouTube.

How can I precisely place a circle on the 3D space? My problem, specifically is this. I placed a precise circle at the origin 0,0,0, then extruded it to a desired height. Next I want to place a circle on top surface of the cylinder, centered about the z-axis. As I hover my circle tool, It indicates “on face”, however, it won’t snap to the z axis as I would prefer. Seems like that would be a logical place for the inference engine to set a point. The best I can do is to zoom WAY in and eyeball it and place center near the 0,0 point. But . . . there has to be a better way.

I was encouraged when I found “Entity Info” but to my dismay, there was only radius and segment available. Why wouldn’t there be more attributes here?

Next I found some things re Ruby console. I bet there is a solution here, but I doubted that one would have to learn scripting language just to put a circle on the z-axis. However, I do look forward to learning about the console feature.

So, sorry for the newbie question, but I would love to discover a simple solution.

Cheers,

2

Just thought of a solution . . . use the offset tool to center a circle within the first circle. Is this the best solution?

Nonetheless, any ideas on my first question about specifying the circle location?

3

You are searching for the inference “center” of the circle. To get it, hover the mouse over the circle, wait until the info text is shown and move the mouse towards the center until you see the inference “center”…

4

I have found that sometimes the inference engine can be somewhat reluctant to figure out that you are trying to find the center of a circle. A quicker way is to create a construction line along the axis. This will give you an easy-to-find intersection on the top of the cylinder.

5

… and if the cylinder isn’t located at the origin, you use the center inference to get that construction line? :wink:

6

If fast is the goal, you should use TIGs CenterPointAll with a shortcut…

7

Any time a tool doesn’t snap to an axis, hover over the origin with the tool first till you see the tooltip ‘Origin’. Then it will snap to axes (for this tool session).

In your case the extusion is blocking the origin. Turn on ‘X-ray’ face style and follow the same instructions as mentioned above. For now the location of the origin is visible again.

In cases of finding a circle’s or arc’s center there are other methods as well. See suggestions made by others above.

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8

Interesting. Hovering the circle at any zoom never seems to find anything but on face. Interesting that my line tool can’t find the z axis unless I rotate the object and start at 0,0,0 and then I can draw a z axis line and sure enough, the circle tool will snap to either the line or the intersection of the line and the top surface.

And I’ll check out plug ins. Have not explored these yet.

Thank you.

9

Yes, thanks, Wo3!! That worked. Once I hovered over the origin, it then recognized the axis!

10

Hello dejswa,

You can install free extensions,Extension | SketchUp Extension Warehouse, which include an extension to create point at the center of the circle.

Yogesh

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