Follow Me tool
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Not sure if this is a bug, or if it's just a quirk that everyone else has gotten used to... but it has been personally driving me crazy ever since I learned how to Follow Me.
http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc42/Edward_Wolf/Refference/Cylinder.png
I was experimenting with large cylinders, this one is about 10 kilometers in diameter and 20 kilometers long. I wanted to use it as a kind of blanket of volume within which I would try and work on asteroid models. But right off the bat I'm running into problems.
This next picture is a zoom in on the lower half of the forward truncated cone.
http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc42/Edward_Wolf/Refference/CylinderCloseUp.pngI made the cylinder's circles out of 360 segments (compared to the default 24), so I could zoom into a portion of the asteroid and add an outpost or a mine or something science-fictiony without seeing the jagged edges of the circle. The problem is now whenever an imperfection crops up, it is usually very very hard to spot (because it's so small compared to the rest of the circle).
And, for reasons that are beyond me, every time I try and use the follow me tool something like the above happens. Either a rectangle will disappear, or it will permanently change colour, or it will just... invert in an odd way. How do the other SU users avoid this problem when working with curved surfaces?
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You ought to have noticed in other threads that include very small <~1mm or very big >~1km faces will fail [a limitation of SUp+OpenGL].
Make you object 10 or 100 times smaller if very large [or bigger if very small] do the stuff like FollowMe and then rescale back to suit - the small faces are OK on the rescale but just don't get made at extreme dimensions.........For heaven's sake why are you attempting to make such gigantic objects - make them smaller and rescale up
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I only mentioned the extreme scale because it's making the follow-me problems particularly encumbersome. I didn't think the scale itself was at the source of the Follow-Me problem... You're suggesting that if I make my models of a more conventional scale my follow-me problems will be... fixed? Because I distinctly remember having similar problems back when I did smaller models as well.
It's just something about the tool that never works perfectly right for me, there's always something that falls out of place in the final shape. And I wanted to know if I'm just doing something wrong, if I'm just unlucky, or if everyone else encounters this as well and they've just learned to live with it.
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I think many have learned to live with it. One thing I do irrespective of the "scale" of the model, and if it does not have to be geometrically perfect: I move vertices one by one to the one nearest, sort of like knitting. If it does not snap to the destination vertex, use Move and Alt key to "Autofold". It may cause the addition of an edge in the adjacent face, which you can smooth soften hide. Then move the camera out several kilometers, or whatever, and see whether the geometric imperfection really matters.
I am the kind of guy that thinks one way or another, these little concessions can cumulatively come back to bite you on the ass. It is a case of deciding whether you need precision or accuracy. -
I don't think it's a scale problem, SketchUp can handle that. But there are "better" practices when using the Follow Me Tool. How re you doing using it?
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@mitcorb said:
I am the kind of guy that thinks one way or another, these little concessions can cumulatively come back to bite you on the ass. It is a case of deciding whether you need precision or accuracy.
Personally I'm a stickler for accuracy too! Back when I would try and sketchup my home I would always wind up with these tiny misscalculations for each rooms. Just a few centimeters here or there, nothing too evident in rooms that are several meters in scope. But when you reach full circle and try and finish a wall that's supposed to be 8 inches thick, and it looks more like a sheet of paper... you know something went wrong.@unknownuser said:
I don't think it's a scale problem, SketchUp can handle that. But there are "better" practices when using the Follow Me Tool. How re you doing using it?
I don't know... I select the beginning of the shape I want to drag (in this case it was a triangle that followed a circle that resulted in a truncated cone), and for 99% of the process it's actually quite smooth in most instances. But EVERY time I finish it and I find a polygon was manhandled somehow, usually right at the end or right at the beginning of where I clicked.Maybe it's simply a lack of familiarity with the system at this point, and I just need practice... I just wonder how others manage to pull off these amazing models with dozens of complex curved surfaces, when I keep breaking my head trying to figure out just a handful of simple ones!
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I don't know either, but if you are using dragging, then Follow Me often works better when if you select the path before selecting the Follow Me tool.
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@philippelemay said:
...And, for reasons that are beyond me, every time I try and use the follow me tool something like the above happens. Either a rectangle will disappear, or it will permanently change colour, or it will just... invert in an odd way. How do the other SU users avoid this problem when working with curved surfaces?
Hi Philippe,
Like Jim, I don't think it's a huge scale issue. I've just created a multi-curved shape with base diameter of 20km. Not by dragging but by preselecting the path and next the face.
This issue may very well be something in the way you setup both path and face, related to each other. Could you share the (a) file with issues prior to the issues itself. Meaning that you undo the last step(s) to return to path plus face.
I'm just wondering how you set things up, especially because angles between two succeeding segments is only 1 degree.It's worth a try.
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@wo3dan said:
@philippelemay said:
...And, for reasons that are beyond me, every time I try and use the follow me tool something like the above happens. Either a rectangle will disappear, or it will permanently change colour, or it will just... invert in an odd way. How do the other SU users avoid this problem when working with curved surfaces?
Hi Philippe,
Like Jim, I don't think it's a huge scale issue. I've just created a multi-curved shape with base diameter of 20km. Not by dragging but by preselecting the path and next the face.
This issue may very well be something in the way you setup both path and face, related to each other. Could you share the (a) file with issues prior to the issues itself. Meaning that you undo the last step(s) to return to path plus face.
I'm just wondering how you set things up, especially because angles between two succeeding segments is only 1 degree.It's worth a try.
I just repeated the similar shape and got a perfect shape... perhaps it is the 'dragging' - preselect the path, then the followme-face...
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One thing I've learned about the Follow-Me tool is to be very selective of where I start the face on the line to be followed.
If I have a perfect circle or arc to follow, it really does not matter. 99 out of 100, the face is perched on a line segments vertex.
But IF the line depicts a non circular CLOSED curve, it seems to matter where on the line the face is perched. It almost always has to be perpendicular to and ON the line, NOT at a vertex.
If the curve is open, then perch the face at the start of the line; but it must be perpendicular to that start line segment.Doing that has reduced the anomalous results dramatically.
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