Using the follow me tool to make a cylinder shaped object

[nate2]

I often draw a shape, draw a floating circle above one edge of it, and use the follow me tool to get a solid object that’s a 360-degree rotation of that shape.

I noticed that when my floating circle has many segments, sometimes the result is bad. If I reduce the amount of segments in the floating circle, then I can use the follow me tool without any errors.

I’m just playing a guessing game on how many segments the circle can have, trying to balance between the resulting shape being what I want, and also being as smooth as possible.

Is there any trick to getting to this end point faster?

(i.e. “I’m drawing the profile of half a chess piece and making a floating circle above it so that I can use the follow-me tool on this profile. I’ll make the floating circle have ___ amount of segments.”)

[dezmo]

@nate2

Is there any trick

The Dave Method

The Dave Method is the clever use of components popularized by @DaveR to avoid the tiny face issue. Sketchup fails to form faces when edge segments get down around the 1/1000" mark. However, tiny faces can exist so the workaround has generally been to scale up your geometry, edit it, then scale back down. This works, but can lead to some issues. The Dave Method leverages the power of components to make life easier. The basic concept is, you start with a component set at the size you want, t…

[nate2]

Thanks!