This is my first ever post and I’m quite new to SU. However, I started off with a very complicated project. I wanted to my make a detailed Sketch of my entire house, which I want to 3D-print down the line.
My problem is that I cannot seem to make it solid. There are a lot of elements that could complicate things. I’ve tried using ‘Solid Inspector 2’ to help, but without success. Yes, I have tried to make it a singular group and exploded all my components, but I still get the ‘unknown size’ etc.
You’re on the right track by using Solid Inspector2, but your model has quite a few problems needing fixed. Some of them are caused by not being careful enough to align your lines on the axes so you have non-planar edges that SketchUp won’t form a face with. You may need to re-draw some of these. You have a bargeboard that tapers up to a point at the top. You have different sized bricks on the window cills that look like they’ve been scaled with the windows (not that these would stop it being solid).
Are you going to print the house as one huge lump of plastic the whole volume of the house? That will cost a lot more if you’re getting someone to print it who charges by volume of plastic.
Or are you going to have it hollow with a wall thickness? If so, your walls, floors and roofs have zero thickness, so you’d need to give them some thickness.
Go through it slowly with SolidInspector, click the problem type then ‘tab’ to cycle through them. You may be better going back to your unexploded model and fixing it there when it’s off-axis lines that are the problem, to make it easier to edit in the future.
I want it to be completely solid on the inside. Right now, it’s basically 1:1 scaling to real life so obviously, that would be ridiculous. No, I want to print it in about a 1:50 scaling.
“Some of them are caused by not being careful enough to align your lines on the axes so you have non-planar edges that SketchUp won’t form a face with.” Can you screenshot those?
“You have different sized bricks on the window cills that look like they’ve been scaled with the windows.” Haha, yeah I’ve noticed it lately. I will get that fixed as well.
“Or are you going to have it hollow with a wall thickness? If so, your walls, floors and roofs have zero thickness, so you’d need to give them some thickness.” That may have to be the given solution if I can’t figure out how to make it a solid object.
Yeah, I find the Solid Inspector a little odd to use. Can surface borders and internal face edges pose a problem? If so, I find it quite tricky to actually fix those lines, because even after erasing and replacing, SI still tells me that they are wrong.
So, I’ve tried to completely remove all the windows and leave it as a flat wall, but it still won’t become a solid object when making it into a group I.E. it still says ‘type: undefined’ etc. in the Entity Info tab.
Orbit to see underneath the cill and your green backface colour shows that you have a hole here. It is easier to see the edges with x-ray mode turned on.
The sloping line on the underneath of the end of the cill (mortar on the end that would fall off?) does not touch the wall. If you extend it parallel until it touches, it is about 0.23mm off the wall which stops SketchUp forming the faces.
20m at 1:50 is still a 400mm long model. I was assuming you were going to print it smaller than that. That’s still a lot of plastic.
Here’s another one on this gable. You need to zoom in quite far then you’ll see all the extra lines. Be really careful with inference points and directions of lines to avoid this sort of thing while you’re drawing.
Thanks for the replies, I will get to your suggestions asap. two questions though:
How do you turn on X-ray?
I’ve tried zooming in as far as possible on the lines, but it gets a little glitchy. It’s somewhat hard to explain, but when I zoom in really far, I can see through the wall. Do you use any special method to zoom that much into objects? I’m looking at your last picture that shows the mess I’ve made of the lines.
Anyway, thanks for the answers. Hopefully, I can get successfully through it now. If not, I hope that you are here to help. Thanks!
View Menu → Face Style → X-ray
I have it set to the ‘x’ key in my shortcuts so I can toggle it on and off at the press of a key.
You can put the styles icons in the toolbar then click the one on the left:
Zooming in to that level can be tricky. Switch between parallel and perspective modes, change the field of view. For example if the default field of view of 35° causes clipping, try 20° or 10°.
Another way is to work on a larger scale model, say scale your house up 100 times. SketchUp doesn’t work so well on tiny models (or huge ones). It is easier to work on something 30mm than 0.3mm in SketchUp.
Hi again, I’ve cleaned my model, but I’ve had to remove the more advanced, though flawed, window sills. But I’m fine with that considering the relatively small size that I’m going to be 3D printing this in (I still need to re-re-down-scale it).
Let me know what you think of it and massively thanks for your advice.
It’s a pity you gave up on your window cills, you could have fixed them.
I’ve never 3D printed anything yet, but here goes anyway:
Your house is one big solid group, which is good, but it is probably too much volume to print. You could give the walls some thickness, but have large hollow volumes inside, possibly with no floor.
There’s large overhangs on that canopy outside the front door which will be difficult to print. I suppose it could be done with some temporary support structure, maybe someone else could help with that?
Amazingly enough, 1 of the windows with the more advanced window sill was without any flaws. I might just ‘simplify’ that one as well. I might also make it hollow inside to safe a little cash I guess.
