So I’ve abused SketchUp for making extremely complex models for CAM for many years. My production files will go through Autodesk but for rapid prototyping for 3D printing and low-quality milling, I can produce files in SketchUp faster than a squirrel can spit, and get working parts drawn from cellphone photos through to end-to-end functional parts 2 hours from initiating the design process. It’s glorious, I get a Zoom call at 8am, and I deliver a functional part before lunch. Nothing is faster than SketchUp and Mountain Dew Code Red (maybe making truly funky rotationally swept gears in SolidWorks but that’s about it.)
Here’s how I abuse sketchup properly and produce watertight/solid entities for production work.
- You’re modelling in inches, so you’re modelling small.
A true SketchUp abuser works in millimeters, at 1000x-10000x increased size. You make your model 1000x larger and run Solid Inspector again. It works now because SketchUp ignores geometry that’s small and then it can’t see the model as solid. Also applies to Clean Up. Clean Up can kill your model geometry if you model small. So if I model 1mm, I actually model 1m, the meter making all my lengths 1000X. Timble could fix this. They will never. The money is in architecture, not fast & loose creative modelling.
2. So you make it big, you scale 1000, run the extension “clean up”, run the extension “solid inspector”, and everything is fine BUT THE ENTITY IS STILL JUST A GROUP.
2a. You did everything big but after using “sold tools” to do a Boolean operation, the resultant is no longer solid!
3. Use an external STL analysis to locate and manually remove the problem. My favorite is Meshmixer for this purpose, as it has little colored handles that point to the problems.
I export the entity as a binary STL from the SketchUp export menu. Depending on how much sand is in the crevices of the Trimble team, this export varies between being available to free users or only for pro users. I can’t predict what the future will hold for this export function.
In Meshmixer, I import the STL, and then I click “analysis” on the lower left of a vertical menu icon ribbon, a little sphere with a grid on it. A menu appears in the upper left corner, and I select “inspector,” then I wait a second for colors to appear. Whatever lights up, that’s where the problem is. I go back to sketch up and rebuild that stupid spot. Typically, it’s two faces on top of each other that only go away after I erase and redraw, or right-click “intersect faces with model” then get rid of the double faces, so that the edges are actually connected to the face, not just floating.
You can also import STLs into 3D printer slicers, but I’ve found they often miss things that Meshmixer catches.
These are popular extensions, but here are links for people who are newer and sobbing into their keyboards with frustration