Where's the Taper Tool???

[kimberlylarae]

Help! I'm an interior design student and we are working with Sketchup. I'm making a sofa and I'm suppose to use the taper tool to taper in the back of the sofa. I can't for the life of me find the taper tool. The tutorial shows one, but there's nothing like that on my toolbar. I went to the help page and the taper tool isn't listed in the index and I tried the search and came up with nothing as well. So where is the silly thing??? I have Sketchup Pro (trial) and regular free Sketchup.

[remus]

I dont think there's is a specific taper tool, my guess is that your refering to the scale tool. You should be able to find it under the tools menu. You might also find it useful to hold down ctrl while using it, this scales around the centrepoint rather than about the opposite point, as happens by default.

[Alan Fraser]

If you actually need to taper the sofa back, rather than just Scale it, as Remus suggests, your best bet would be to install the Sketchy Freeform Deformation Ruby script. Then you could use the Scale tool on a group of the control points in order to taper/deform it.
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=6029&hilit=+Plugin

[johnsenior1973]

There is a taper tool available here: http://www.drawmetal.com/download

I don't know if that's what you mean. I use that ruby and would recommend it.

[Gaieus]

That's a cool script John is suggesting but generally speaking, tapering is done by the scale tool - IF you are tapering something with single faces on the sides (i.e. a curved tube for instance cannot be tapered this way).

So what exactly do you mean by "tapering in the back of the sofa"? Note that an image (or even a model) would be very helpful.

[max-cx]

Thanks again for the feedback on my ruby scripts.

Just FYI...

The Taper Maker script will draw tapered offsets in addition to tapered extrusions. You access this capability by entering one of the following in the options field on the input dialog:
"o" or "offset" or "offsets"

When this option is used, the script does not draw a tapered extrusion along your selected path. Instead, it draws four tapered offsets (paths) along your selected path. These paths would be centerlines along the faces of the tapered extrusion "above", "below", "left" and "right" of your path.

Here is an example of four tapered offsets around a path:
tapered offsets.pdf

This option facilitates using one tapered curve as the basis for another as in this metalworking example:
taper on taper.pdf

HTH