Trying to create a wall face that is both sloping and has a radius?

I was hoping someone here might be able to help me. I’m building a wall in the attached model. The face of the wall is vertically slanted, yet also follows the radius of the circle in front of it. I can’t figure out how to draw the wall face. Can anyone help?

Slanted Wall.skp (129.7 KB)

Do you mean like this?

You could stitch the vertices together with the Line tool and then soften the edges.

You could also use an extension like Curviloft to do the same thing.

It would be better and easier to work with if your arcs top and bottom had the same number of sides and the vertices were aligned.

Here I’ve recreated the lower curve using Offset off the bottom edge of the wall. Then the curves can be stitched together (either manually or via extension) without requiring the triangulation.

There are, of course, other ways to do this which would be more efficient and require less work. For example you could draw the cross section of the wall and use Follow Me to extrude it along an arc path.

Depending on how critical the lower arc position and shape is. One way is to do is simply select the existing arc at the bottom of the vertical face and move it out to new location, and erase the excess (due to the second arc you already drew). The faces should move/ deform with it.

Thanks. I haven’t used sketchup in years so I’m pretty rusty. How do I draw the equally spaced vertices? Or am I better off getting the extension?

I used Offset from the bottom edge of your wall. I don’t think you need an extension to do something simple like this although for a more complex shape, Fredo6’s Curviloft or TIG’s Extrude Tools could be very helpful in speeding up the process.

FWIW, the method Peter shows, while workable doesn’t result in the same curve at the bottom that mine does. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It’s just different.

Thank you. I tried doing this, but couldn’t keep the sides straight as I moved the bottom curve line out.

Do you mean the ends of the wall? I get one straight by selecting the curve at the righthand end. But this won’t be possible with both. I ended up with an extra edge triangulating that face. If this is necessary, another technique is needed. Probably creating the endwalls first. As you see in Dave’s model, a vertical edge bisecting the wall, keeps a straight vertical section while adding a triangular section that can be angled as needed. I could redraw my wall that way in a couple steps.

Moving the bottom curve outward means that all points on that curve move in the same direction. So if you move the curve in the direction of the edge shown at the bottom of my screen shot, the endpoint at the other end moves in the direction of the red arrow. All the other points on the curve move parallel to that edge, too.

Using Offset to create the edge like I showed means all the points “move” in toward the center instead.

Not sure if I did this right, but I erased the bottom plane, then used the move tool by pulling the face from each bottom corner (left and right) toward the front ends of each triangle piece.

Slanted Wall.skp (131.0 KB)

It’s right if that’s the desired shape of the wall. Correct your face orientation though. The blue color indicates back faces, those should be on the inside.

Basically I need the top and bottom edges of the wall face to be true offsets of the center circle. So I’m wondering if I sort of cheated in that sense and maybe this is incorrect.

If you moved the bottom edge to make the slope, it’s not a true offset of the circle. That’s why I was telling you to use Offset instead of Move. What are you actually trying to model?

It’s going to be a wall in a memorial. One thing I’m confused about though. I imported this from Autocad, so I don’t understand why the front edge of the sloped wall would need to be drawn over again? It was already a perfect offset from Autocad. I should have mentioned that.

Autocad has real circles and circular arcs whereas SketchUp represents them using a sequence of straight edges. So, the circles and arcs need to be converted during import to SketchUp. The conversion can lead to issues. For example, as seen here, the number of segments isn’t necessarily the same in all arcs (six at the top, five at the bottom). It is also possible that an edge that met an arc in Autocad may overshoot or fall short of the straight edge approximation in SketchUp if it doesn’t happen to end at a vertex of the arc approximation.

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Thanks everyone for your help on this. I used the offset method, then connected the vertices. Wall.skp (100.8 KB)

Good. Now reverse all the faces so you have white front faces out instead of the blue back faces.

There are some unneeded edges in your model that could be deleted.

Got it. Thanks again!

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