Greetings all!
I’m having a bit of trouble with CLF Shape Bender in Sketchup Make 2017. As an assignment I have to create a detailed design of an object in my designed neighborhood. My idea was a pedestrian bridge in the center of my city.
It’s supposed to be shaped like an infinity symbol, so I looked around and CLF Shape Bender was the right tool for this job. Up untill…
I’ve created a module of a walking bridge, but when I try to use Shape Bender to bend it into this shape, my Sketchup client freezes. No clue what’s causing this “freeze”. I know that the extention takes a while to think, but half an hour just to bend this object seems very odd to me.
I’ve added the .skp file, in case anyone would like to try as well.
The Group you are trying the ‘Bend’ has many sub-groups and then sub-component-instances - bogging it down.
It should only contain raw geometry - edges and faces…
You can explode its parts back to those basics, but there will then be tens of thousands of bits - taking ages to process…
It could be reduced to much a simpler form and readily achieve your aims…
Use the Outliner to reveal the extent of the issues !
Back-to-the-drawingboard
Shape Bender will work with nested groups and components, the more complex it is the longer it will take, plus the nesting will be removed from the resulting shape.
Your shape will work, you just have to wait for it. Depending on your computer it can take a very long time. I cleaned my entire kitchen in the time this took.
Also worth noting that the position of the straight line in relation to the shape will make a difference to the result.
Here I have move the straight line so it is centered on your group, the position you currently have it would make a shape with one big ring and one small one. So it all depends what you need.
Component Stringer is by the same developer as Shape Bender.
It can be a bit fiddly to get right and there are other versions of similar tools. It’s worth spending time looking at what is available in the Extension Warehouse and Sketchucation, not to mention the various other repositories of plugins.
Basically the idea is you set up the path you want and use an appropriate tool to produce what you need along that path.
Here I have used follow me and copy along curve.
Note how I use Follow Me within the group context by selecting the raw geometry path, then the tool then right click and edit to get to the profile.
Also you may not notice it but I used paste in place to get the raw paths for the top geometry. Not shown here, I did the follow me first then selected the edges within the group and pasted in place outside the group. It’s the part where you see the two edges highlighted before I do the handrails.
It might look complex but it’s actually quite simple.
