Need help smoothing out a letter
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To change a circle from a collection of straight lines, to one that appears to be a true circle, I do the following:
draw circle
delete inside of circle
select circle
window
entity info
increase number of segments
see circle smooth outI thought I would be able to do the same thing with the letter "S". I thought I would click the 3D text icon, type the S, and proceed from there. But, it doesn't work as it did with the circle. Can someone give me a step by step on how to do this? I need to cut out some letters on my CNC for a wedding and can't figure out how to get the letters smoothed out in SketchUp. Thanks
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You can do this with the circle, arc and polygon entities because they are recognized as such entities (and handled differently from "normal" geometry) but these 3D letters are just simple geometry without special, added functions.
So the only way is to either draw the 2D geometry in another application (which has the ability to do it with more segments), import the geometry and start from there or subdivide the 3D geometry inside SU. Below is a model with two S letters - the left one is the default S and the right one is a subdivided S. Certainly some more care could have been given to the subdivision (especially at the ends of the letter) but the theory works.
1 iteration with Artisan - the top and bottom faces were creased (to keep them planar) and at the end, CleanUp used to remove unnecessary, coplanar edges from these faces.
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I found that with Fredo's Bezierspline tool you can change the number of segments with Select curve> right click- Convert to> Polyline Segmentor> Specify segment number in pop up. This will remove the faces formed by the selection as it increases the segment count.
So, doing it this way, you would have to edit the text component by reducing it down to a 2d profile, modify the segment count, then extrude the profile to the desired thickness.
Tedious, no doubt for a significant number of these letters.
There may be other ways to do it more quickly? -
Segmentor increase the number of segments but doesn't refine the curve, I would choose Convert to Catmull spline.
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It seems to me that maybe this is a task for which there's a better application. Inkscape comes to mind.
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@dave r said:
It seems to me that maybe this is a task for which there's a better application. Inkscape comes to mind.
Thanks to everyone.
The reason I was using SketchUp is because of its ability to easily change my drawings into code for my CNC. I have used Inkscape very little and don't know if it will produce DXF files. I will check to see. One way or the other I'll get it done and report back.
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@gilles said:
With BezierSpline, before
Your left S looks great! Pardon my ignorance but... was this produced with a function of SU or in another application?
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Fredo's 'Curvisard' >> 'Smooth Contours' used on the curves does a quick and reasonably good job on a non-extruded 'font face'.
Different fonts have higher precision.
3D Text does have a 'best tolerance quality' when used from code, but you can only turn it down. Can be useful if re-drawing 'from scratch'
e.g. # Draw an "S" at the origin of the model, aligned left, inArial Bold, not italics, 1" in size, least tolerance quality, filled,
with an extrusion size of 0".
Sketchup.active_model.entities.add_3d_text('S', TextAlignLeft, "Arial", true, false, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, true, 0.0)john
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S with 3D text SU then BezierSpline.
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