Long time blender user. I wanted to take a break from poking vertices and try out SketchUp. Primary use is creating STLs for 3D printing.
I thought I was getting used to the workflow of digitising my sketches using guides and lines, so far so good, until I had to start using solid functions.
I created a solid “blank” and a profile “negative” and wanted to trim the solid using the profile. When I try to do this, the trim tool is acting more like union, except the profile geometry is being added to the solid as negative faces?
Not really sure what I’m doing wrong here, any ideas?
Since you are apparently new to SketchUp, I’ll explain @mihai.s answer. To allow for computer arithmetic, SketchUp doesn’t create new edges shorter than about 0.001 inch. This can cause faces not to form. By scaling up the model (or a copy of a component) you avoid the short edges. When the goal is to export as stl, many of us model as if meters are really inches or mm or something smaller. Because stl does not convey units, the recipient of the stl can’t tell what you used in SketchUp.
Thanks for your replies, yes scaling up the model does work. I would have thought that setting the model length units to mm and precision to 1 decimal, should signal to SketchUp my intentions. The engine should automatically do this compensation for me.
It’s true that STLs don’t convey units, but modelling in cm or m in SketchUp means scaling back down in the slicer. Blender has export settings to compensate for this, does SketchUp?
Is SketchUp the wrong software for what I want to do? Which is model small to medium sized parts for 3D printing.
No it doesn’t. I do all of my modeling for 3D printing with units set to Meters. On millimeter in the 3D print is 1 meter in the model. I export with Model Units or Meters and import into the slicer as millimeters. No need to scale the model down at all.
These parts were done that way recently.
The smaller part clips onto a tube about 19mm in diameter. The ID of that part in the model is 19 meters.
Sketchup can do what you want to do, now if it’s the right software for you is a different question. If you feel more comfortable with other software than with sketchup, you should definitely go with the tool you feel more comfortable with. I love sketchup but if a new software is created, that fulfills my needs better than sketchup, I would definitely stop using it and go with the better tool for me.
and even if you manage to fail at picking the right units ( ) re-scaling in a slicer is usually simple. all you need is one global dimension like height.
While that’s not an insane notion, that is not what those settings in SketchUp mean. They control the format in which SketchUp displays values, not the possible actual values.
It is that way because there are many situations in which SketchUp has to calculate the location of a point, for example the vertices of a circle or where two edges intersect. In such circumstances the theoretical value often doesn’t have a finite representation, so your wish can’t be fulfilled. For example, would you be happy if a circle came out as a strange polygon because all the vertices were forced to positions with one decimal digit of precision?
More to your original issue, it would be nice if the solid tools in SketchUp internally scaled the objects up, did the operation, and then scaled them back down so as to avoid the culling of points that are too close to each other (the culling only happens when new points are calculated, not when an object is scaled).
) re-scaling in a slicer is usually simple. all you need is one global dimension like height.