Circles
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Can someone explain to me why after initially drawing a circlular study desk,, the circle becomes a series of straight lines of undetermined length?
I am baffled!
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Its just the way SU (and all poly modellers) work. As the name suggests they all deal with polygons, or faces bordered by edges. so there is no such thing as a perfectly curved surface in SU, just lots of really small faces that combine together to look like a curved surface.
You should get a better idea of what i mean if you go view->hidden geometry.
The way to solve this problem is to add more faces to give a smoother curve. With arcs and circles its simply a case of typing in the number of edges you want to make up your arc/circle before you try and draw with them.
Unfortunately there is no way of adding more segments to current geometry.
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You can add edges to an arc or circle after its drawn if it has not been exploded or push/pulled. Select it (just the edge, not the face if it has a face) and open the entity info. It shows how many segments there are. Just type in a new value. If you can't edit the value, than that means the arc/circle has been modified in a way that makes it so it is non-editable anymore. Hope that makes sense,
Chris
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Thankyou Chris,
that is extremely helpful, is there any way of making a circle's segments default at, say, 1000 sides?
Also, if you have any recomendations, I would like to add some simple interior lighting to my furniture models (I design furniture and interiors)and have the Kerkytheran plugin, but I would rather use something tried and tested.
Many thanks,
Alan St. Clair
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I dont think theres any way of making the number of segments default to a certain number, although i could be wrong. Just a word of caution, youd probably be fine with 100 segments for most applications, and generally its a good idea to keep it as low as possible as lots of segments=lots of faces=cumbersome models.
As for the lighting, kerkythea (or a similar rendering engine) is probably your best bet for getting good lighting. there isnt really any control over lighting in SU, its just sub or nothing really, and it doesnt do soft shadows either.
Maxwell might be worth a look if youve got a bit of cash to spare, as it has a very good multi-light feature that gives you lots of control over the lighting in any given scene, which can be very useful, or so im told.
If your looking for sometihng a bit simpler, either podium or lightup are probably the way to go. They both offer a very quick and easy to learn way of adding lighting and improved materials handling to SU. Do a search of the forums for more info, or ask
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Yeah, like Remus says, there is no way to change the default sides a circle or arc has. But you can change the number of sides while your making it by typing 1000s, for example. So select circle tool. Click once, then type 1000s <enter> to change the circle to have 1000 sides. Then type 15'<enter> (or a measurement in meters, such as 300cm). This will give a size to your circle and it will be done. Now, once you set the sides of one circle, all subsequent circles will have that same amount of sides by default. So every cirlce afterwards will autmatically have 1000 sides until you close sketchUp. Once you open SU again, it goes back to 24 sides.
Also there are people doing some amazing interior design work in SketchUp who aren't even using a rendering program. There mgiht be some stuff in the gallery forum on this board. Good luck and have fun!
Chris
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One caution to using high segment counts for arcs and circles. You can very rapidly bloat the file size and degrade computer performance that way. Keep in mind that once you've made a change in the segment count for the model, it will remain at that setting. While you might want a high segment count for the edge of a table or counter top, you probably won't for a bullnose or other rounded profile. If the curve is small, you won't notice that it is made of a small number of segments. You probably won't need to set the segment count anywhere close to 1000 for the appearance of a smooth curve. Maybe around 100 would be plenty.
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