How to Fill In a Missing Section?

BSquared18

Hi,

When an object (in my case an airplane) is exported from X-Plane into SketchUp, errors occur, including some missing pieces. My present concern is a small narrow, four-sided "hole" in the nose section of the airplane model.

Although the missing section is flat, not curved, I haven't figured out how to patch the hole. I tried selecting the edges and using Tools --> Utilities --> Create a Face but got a failure message. I tried using the line and Freehand Drawing tools to draw in the missing section, but what I get isn't flush with the rest of the nose section.

P.S. Upon further testing, I realized the section is not flat--it's not coplaner, which is the reason for my problems, I suppose. I'll try using small triangles to fill it in.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Bill

Dave R

It would be nice to have the SKP file. That would make it much easier to tell you the exact solution to your problem. Since we don't have it, I'll take a guess. First, assuming the hole is not too small, I would turn on Hidden Geometry (View menu) and then use the Line tool to fill in as needed. If that requires triangulation, so be it. For one hole it should only take a few seconds to do this. Make sure you correct the face orientation on the new faces if required.

If the hole is tiny, SketchUp won't fill in the the missing faces when you trace the edges or triangulate so before editing, make sure the thing is a component (not a group). Copy the component over to one side out of the way. Get the Scale tool and scale this copy up by a factor of 100 or 1000. Edit the large copy as needed to fill in the missing faces. When finished, close the component so you aren't in editing more. Select the giant copy and hit Delete. Now go back to the original which will be sitting where you left it but with the hole fixed.

No plugins required.

BSquared18

Thanks, Dave.

For future reference, how does one attach a SketchUp file?

Bill

Dave R

Look below the message window when you're typing. There's a tab labelled Upload attachment. Click on that, select the file and hit the "Add the file" button.