An Apparent Face-Intersections View
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I do a lot work with piping and the like. If I have a cylinder passing through another cylinder, sphere, or object with compound surfaces I would like to display edges where the surfaces intersect each other. To do this I have to perform intersections in one form another. It is time consuming, can be tricky, and messy when geometry changes and the intersections have to be redone.
It seems to me if SketchUp is sophisticated enough to display and control Profiles, the programmers should be able to develop a viewing mode where you turn-on/off the display of "apparent" interections of surfaces. Also have an option where you could assign this property on an object by object basis similar to what can be done with casting and receiving shadows.
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but if you think about how long it takes SketchUp to intersect a large model with a lot of polygons - I am afraid it would slow down the program a great deal.
by the way: how does your geometry change, when you intersect it? is it that you lose some faces or rather that some geometry (round shapes for example) harden (suddenly show a lot of lines)?
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Dear John,
You might like to try the following. Suppose you position two cylinders to form a reducing tee. Make the parts a component, go into edit mode, select the surfaces to intersect and then intersect. While in edit mode, change to wire-frame viewing and select the edges forming the intersections. Copy, come out of edit mode and then select paste in place. The edges forming the intersection will be highlighted and superimposed on the component and can be moved away for viewing.
Is this what you had in mind?
Regards,
Bob -
Plot: I realize there is potential for a slowdown, probably similar to that when you go to Xray mode, but when the model is "finalized for presentation" that could very well warrant having specific Scenes saved with this view mode turned on; it would certainly facilitate the print-output or when there is a need for a closeup which examines specific details.
The surface appearance can change depending upon edge-length and detail, model scale, and the smoothing/softening properties of the intersecting geometry. Part of the idea for the suggestion, aside from doing the actual physical intersecting, was to eliminate tweeking smoothing and softening properties by merely superimposing non-smoothed "virtual-edges" representing the intersection.
Bob: I use a similar method already. But with more "organic" or dense geometry, the method can be time consuming and not conducive to making fast changes at later date; it some cases it might involve reconstructing the original geometry (or retrieving early versions of the model).
Regards, John
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