Sketchup push/pull & line tool creating degenerate faces

[fstephan]

Hi all,
First time post. I apologize ahead of time if this subject has already been discussed. I'm using sketchup to create objects which are being imported into 3ds max and exported into a game engine. Through this process I'm continually running into the same problems:
Degenerated faces (I believe this is the right term). This seems to be most common when I use the push/pull tool. Sometimes it booleans out all the necessary faces. Sometimes it does not. I'm getting faces inside the mesh, faces with two sides (edges) and two vertices sharing the same location.
The line tool, while sometimes works perfectly fine, also creates degenerates at times. I sometimes like to draw edges on a face so I can have more control over where the triangulations/quads will be when exported. Basically make sure there are no 5+ sided faces before export. This has drawn faces in the same location. I guess this would be a dihedron or degenerate also.
Any suggestions to keep my mesh cleaner would be much appreciated, thanks in advance!

[Chris Fullmer]

I think the most important thing is to just be more careful when you model. SketchUp REALLY likes to fill in faces whenever it can. So try to be aware of that. Make sure to go back in and delete those unwanted faces. Some people like to turn on x-ray mode to help see inside models a little bit better. It might help.

Also, there is a nice triangluate ruby script that was just released. It should help triangulate your faces for you.
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=20347

What game engine are you exporting to?

Chris

[fstephan]

Thanks for the reply,

@unknownuser said:

I think the most important thing is to just be more careful when you model. SketchUp REALLY likes to fill in faces whenever it can. So try to be aware of that. Make sure to go back in and delete those unwanted faces.

Ya, that's my current workflow and while it works it's nearly impossible to find everything until you get to max. I'm hoping there is a hotkey you can hold down to keep the line tool from drawing faces and only cut pre-existing geometry. Maybe there was a workflow for the pushpull tool in which it would boolean out all the degenerate faces as opposed to some (basically hoping I'm using it wrong) and I still can't pinpoint why it deletes the ones it does. Gamebryo is the game engine. Cool triangulation script.