Some help with this please...

roldahayes · 14 Jun 2011, 09:37

Hi,

I am having a bit of a nightmare trying to achieve this type of bend...

The diameter of the the rod is 6mm and although there are 90 deg bends on it, in real life they are slightly curved.

I was using the line tool to draw the bend, added a 6mm circle on one end and then used the "Follow Me" tool.

No matter how I try, the corners are always missing as the corners appear to be too sharp?

Can anyone suggest a work around.

Thanks

TIG · 14 Jun 2011, 09:50

You are experiencing the 'small faces' problem.
Sketchup/OpenGL has trouble creating face geometry < ~1mm.
When you make small bent forms like this with FollowMe then the tiny faces that are required can fail to form - hence your missing facets!

BUT it is easily solvable.
Group the object you are making and scale it x10 [or x100 if it's really small].
It's best to have made all of the required geometry to use with FollowMe before scaling, but remember that if you add any new geometry after scaling up you need to make it x10 [or x100] bigger - i.e. 6mm >> 60mm [OR 600mm]...
Do the FollowMe and all faces should now get created OK.
Rescale the group back down x0.1 [or x0.01] and the faces will remain OK - the issue is creating them, they can exist OK afterwards even when scaled down to be very small.

Tip: don't give the circle you are extruding too many sides - it will make a polygon heavy form that is unlikely to look any better in most renders etc... so try 8 or 12 segments instead of 24 or 36...

roldahayes · 14 Jun 2011, 10:07

Excellent! I have spent hours trying to sort this.

Most of the things I create are only a few millimetres in size so this technique will come in really handy!

Gaieus · 14 Jun 2011, 10:19

Okay, if that is the general with your models, you could even choose a template with centimetres (x10) or metres (x1,000) and keep modelling "as if" you were doing it in millimetres (i.e. no need to recalculate the values every time you draw something).

At the end, when you are finished, you can scale the whole thing down and in the model info dialog, set the units to mm (it will "stick" for this particular model file only).

If you do any texturing with image materials, only do it with the correctly scaled down model (images get scaled up/down when inside groups/components).