Tiny errors caused by the tools

Yoghurt

Hi, I am new here and glad to introduce myself together with my little problem, which I hope to be able to solve after you provided me with your advice .
So... I have this problem where the tools I use in SketchUp cause my model to be unprecise on a very small scale. There are a variety of tools with which I noticed those tiny errors. The tools I am talking off are the regular SketchUp modification tools like "Move", "Rotate" and "Push". At first I thought to myself that I had to be the one who made some very small unnoticed mistake somewhere, which caused all these tiny errors all over my model upon me orientating the creation of new geometry on this eventual mistake.
But after I performed some experiments I figured that the tools are actually making mistakes, which doesn't make sense to me at all.
For example: I may create a component, which I would then copy and rotate multiple times around the same point, five times to be precise. Now, there are not a lot of things that could go wrong here, but I am sure that the pivot point of the copied object should be exactly overlaying the corresponding point of the original object, since the pivot point is (logicaly) the only thing that doesn't move when the object is rotated. This however, is not the case. the pivot point allways moves to a slightly different place. This is actually so slightly, one would probably not notice anything until one were to zoom very very closely to the pivot point (or the multiple pivot points in this case ). Thats only one example. This errors only seem to occur when components are involved, but I am not sure of that.
Now I ask you, WHAT IS WRONG?

Thanks^^.

baz

Hi Yogurt.
What you are experiencing is one of the limitations of SU. It doesn't like extremely small geometry.
Fortunately there is an easy workaround. Simply scale your model up x10 or more. When you are finished scale down again.
If you scale by 1000 and change your units to Metres you can 'pretend' that they are Millimetres.
With components, make a copy and move it away, scale it up, (without exploding), do your edits and it will be updated in other instances.

Also, there is a discussion about rotation problems here.
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=44972&p=404059&hilit=challenge#p404059

Hope this helps.

mitcorb

Another possibility is that while working at a small enough scale or with the camera at a sufficient distance, you click near a snap point rather than on the snap point to generate lines or whatever. So when you select a pivot point, you think you are selecting the right one but you actually hit the left one, or whatever.

Amema

I noticed this too. When I made a triangular shape for a dome and then turned it into a component, the length of the legs were shortened. I'll try the up-scaling trick to see if this is overcome.

Yoghurt

Thanks a lot for the help, I stopped working on the model for a while but now I continued. I tried various approaches to the problem, including the ones suggested here, but soon discovered that there was more to my problem than I initially thought. I made a new thread about it here.

Thanks again for your help .