Newbie here, working on my first model (my house, in preparation for a porch project next year).
I’ve been learning as I go with good success, but have now run into a small issue that I just can’t wrap my head around. For whatever reason, I can’t heal the geometry into a coherent plane on the front side of my small front porch. If I erase the redundant line seen in the screenshot, the entire plane is erased. I’ve tried rebuilding my geometry from scratch a couple of times, but I end up with the same problem regardless. Probably a simple mistake somewhere, but I’m at my wit’s end.
If anyone of you more experienced modellers would have time to take a look at this and shed some light, I’d be very grateful.
A couple of things:
There were lines over lines over faces. When you tried a few times, you didn’t completely erase the old stuff, so new stuff still made the same mistakes.
Nothing has any “thickness”; while it doesn’t really matter if you are not going to see the internals, it is much easier to “push/pull” surfaces rather than move lines.
Groups are your friends. Put something into a group and you can still snap to the geometry, but it won’t attach.
Things that you are going to mirror or duplicate, make components - then you change one and the other changes.
How did you create the shape in the first place? There are at least 10 different ways I can think on to make that shape.
I will try to replicate your solution on my own file and see if I can learn from that. I will pay attention to lines over lines and try to see where I went wrong.
I realised the absence of “thickness” a while ago, but as I am only modelling the exterior I was hoping it wouldn’t be a big issue (plus I wasn’t sure how to fix it without starting over from scratch). It has caused a few issues already though, so I’ll definitely keep it in mind moving forward.
I don’t totally understand “Put something into a group and you can still snap to the geometry, but it won’t attach.” Would you mind explaining this a bit more in detail? I haven’t used groups at all yet.
I’ve had good use of components when making the windows, so I think I have that part figured out.
I can’t recall how I created that specific shape in the first place, I was revisiting this section now to add depth and detail. But trying to fix this issue I reconstructed it in several different ways hoping to solve the problem. But as you correctly pointed out, the culprit was likely some underlying geometry.
Again, many thanks for your help and input, I appreciate it!
As you’ve noticed, Edges (lines) in SketchUp are “sticky”, meaning whenever they touch they irreversibly meld together.
Thus, as a model becomes more and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid unintentional damage to what you’ve already built.
Getting a clear view of the geometry you’re working with becomes a problem as well.
Think of Groups and Component as containers which isolate the geometry within … no more stickiness.
They also provide a highly efficient means of controlling visibility while building the model.
Groups and Components
Model the first part of the building and make that portion of the model into a Group or Component before you begin modeling the next part, and so on, until the model is complete.
When finished, a properly constructed model is an assembly of Groups and Components, with no ‘raw’ (un-grouped) geometry left behind.
A model properly constructed of Groups and Components enables you to efficiently control modeling visibility.
Like this…
