Reverse Faces? How?
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Hi. I want to know how to reverse faces in SketchUp if previously I apply the material. I don't know what faces are correct. The reason I want to do this is because I try to export to 3ds Max and the respective blue faces don't see in 3ds max. Thank You!
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View > Face Style > Monochrome
will show you faces without textures
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If I may make a suggestion for your next model, work in Monochrome and correct the face orientation as you go. Leave texturing until the end. this will save you a great deal of effort later in the modeling process and will eliminate the frustration of faces that don't appear when rendered.
You might also change the style so the back face color is some bright but distracting color which will make it easy to spot especially if you have small holes to deal with..
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Hi folks.
And to reverse a face, do a right click on the face and choose "reverse face" in the contextual menu that will apear.
Just ideas.
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Also if the shape is not too complicated you can click on one face that is oriented outwards and right click/orient faces.
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To complete this:
sometimes it will happen that you have a more complex shape with some softened lines on it which makes it impossible to select single faces of that shape.
The whole surface will be selected.You can:
open window "soften edges" and (with face selected) turn down the slider so all lines will appear.
The better way will be by downloading this great set of plugins (really essential)
especially the CD Standard Tools.
Activate them from the view > toolbars menu. You can then deactivate the native sketchup standard toolbar, it will be obsolete.
There fifth icon from the right will show all hidden geometry (and therefor softened lines) and you can edit all single faces (eg of one shape).Good luck, have fun!
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Better than unsoftening the faces, is to simply turn on hidden geometry (View > Hidden Geometry) This will enable you to select a correctly oriented face and context click to make all others like it (as Karina says) or to individually correct a few reversed faces.
Personally, I almost always model in monochrome mode with Hidden Geometry visible...except for a few occasions when I turn it off because i need to select an entire smoothed area; and it's quicker to do that with a single click when all the smoothed lines have disappeared, than to have to select all the smoothed faces individually.
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@karinagm said:
Also if the shape is not too complicated you can click on one face that is oriented outwards and right click/orient faces.
This is a very good and quick way to correctly orient all faces IF - as Karina says - your model is not too complex. It works best with pieces that are similar to those now called "solids" in SU. Say a nicely closed shape with no inner faces.
If there is a face also inside, that face also needs to orient somewhere and SU simply cannot "decide" which face should look which direction.
There are a couple of face reversing plugins available - but due to this "limitation" above, none of the fully automated plugins can be expected to work 100%. Tomasz has a plugin that works like a "brush" - you sweep over any face and it only reverses back faces - leaving front faces intact (so you do not need to meticulously select them prior to reversing) and what's more, it will dig down into multiple levels of nested groups/components so you do not need to edit them one by one:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=13380The only "drawback" of this plugin is that it also respects hidden and softened edges so for a whole cylinder, you have to go through all the facets (but of course, this is how it is supposed to work).
Now in case you have reversed all the faces, you may still end up with your materials added on the back faces - and now only some white colours displayed outside. ThomThom's "UV Toolkit" can help copying all the backface materials to the front faces keeping UV co-ordinates (which is essential if you did any texture positioning before).
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=18992 -
If you have a lot of reversed faces, there are several plugins that can help you. This is one.
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If you have applied materials to the backs of faces models the wrong way round there are also tools like 'FixReversedFaceMaterials' [do a search] - that tool finds all faces in a selection that have a material on the back but not the front, it then reverses them and swaps the material from back to from keeping the UV mapping so any textures appear exactly the same as they were before, but now all faces are hopefully correctly oriented and 'materialed'... Sometimes simply reversing faces to be consistently oriented won't work without lots of subsequent reapplication of textured materials and UV mapping adjustments - this does it in one step...
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