Circle Gets Warped

Kirsten

Hello,

I am simply trying to take a circle along an arc to be the "arm" of a lamp fixture. But when I use the follow me tool it warps the circle so that it is not round or flat on the correct side anymore. See attached image. Is there an easy solution for this?

Thanks.

Warped Circle.jpg

Dave R

Kirsten, the problem is that your circular profile doesn't start out perpendicular to the first segment of the path so SketchUp projects a perpendicular face which is thus not circular but elliptical. The solution is to place the circle so it is perpendicular to that first segment. then SketchUp won't need to make the projection. Note that the extrusion will finish up perpendicular to the last segment as well.

Your question might be, "How do I construct the face perpendicular to the end of the arc. Well here's one way.

Working from the back left:

Your arc.
Draw two lines off the arc and parallel to each other. They are perpendicular to the segment of the arc.
Connect the two lines with another line to create a face.
Use Push/Pull to extrude the face a bit.
Delete all of the resulting box except the face at the end of the arc. That face (shown in green here) will be perpendicular to the first segment in the arc. That's not the reference face for your circular profile.

Kirsten

Thanks

I found a script that worked.

[quote="Chris Fullmer"]Perpendicular Face Tools
Description: Three Perpendicular Face tools to help create faces perpendicular to the end of lines.
Usage: Activate it at Plugins>Chris Fullmer Tools>Perpendicular Line Tools. Change the size of squares by entering a new dimension into the measuerments box after the face has been created. Change the radius of circles by entering "12s" for 12 sides into the measurements box. To use the custom face tool, create your face flat on the groundplane. The script attempts to line up the x axis as the bottom edge of the face.

New Video for v1.1 (outdated for 1.2. Doesn't show that you can hit the up arrow key to rotate).
[flash=670,630:3lxs453w]http://www.chrisfullmer.com/chrisfullmer/forums/clf_perpendicular_face_tools_v1_1.swf[/flash:3lxs453w]

Chris

Dave R

Yes, that script works quite well but it can also be useful to know how to do it with the native tools, too.