New to Sketchup / 3d and have had a pretty tough time getting my head around what feels like the “unstoppable” inference engine to do, what I think, are very common and simple tasks.
Right now, I’m recreating my residence on a site plan for a remodel. I started with all of the structures (buildings, gardens, sidewalks, etc) and have the overall model more or less how I’d like it. Groups, components, layers - it’s not perfect, but for my needs, it’s workable.
This week, I did a simple site survey with a laser level, made terrain out of contours and now am trying to get my structures and landscape, etc… all to coordinate on the Z-axis. So far, so good.
What I’m trying to do now is to “stamp” the terrain for the buildings and features. Bocce court, no problem, House, no problem.
Where I’m having a problem is with the sidewalk and driveway. The problem I have is that somehow I drew these in a non-coplanar way (I don’t understand for the life of me why you cannot easily “lock Z” in “top” view when drawing), but they are “correct” when viewed top-down relative to everything else.
Thought this would be simple. Just locked the group I wanted to re-create “on plane” and trace it, right? Wrong. When I trace it, the inference engine is grabbing the Z coordinates that I’m trying to flatten and I get a “copy” of the mistake. I’ve pulled the geometry to the side of the model, so I’m really only hitting the points of the thing I’m trying to re-create. I would have thought “lock” would have prevented the inference engine from doing its thing. I tried a “draw a co-planar rectangle first” suggestion, but either I didn’t get it, or Sketchup didn’t.
We’re talking very very simple shapes here, but they are top-down “dimensional” so I would like to preserve the work that I had and also, just want to learn how to do this for future goof-ups.
I’ve looked at a bunch of similar questions, but they generally are using jpg or pdf to trace, and I’ve also tried to find extensions that can simply flatten. Coming from a 2d / mostly Adobe world, I’m surprised that you can’t grab a group of points / edges and assign a Z value for all of them.
I’m sure I’m missing something either obvious, or just haven’t gotten my head around it correctly. Re-drawing the geometry, as it is a sidewalk between a bunch of complex geometry and terrain now, has the same inferencing problem that I can’t seem to get away from when just trying to re-trace the object.
Appreciate advice and patience from the community. Feel pretty good that I’ve gotten this far without bugging you guys, but this simple task is killing me
(apparently I can only put one image in a post, so this is the geometry I’m trying to trace from “top”), sorry I can’t upload more contextual photos