Hello and a question

RossChampion

Hey Guys,

Very happy to have found this forum. I've been learning SU for about 3 months now, and just upgraded to SketchUp PRO 8.

I have a business that makes a boat decking product that is retrofit on to existing boats.

I use SU to layout simple 2D line drawings of the boat decks that I export to .DXF or .DWG and our machine shop uses to cut our pieces.

The problem I am having is with how SU handles arcs and circles. I'm looking for a plugin that could take the line segments and create a true arc out of them when I export? Are there any tools that can do this? I have done some searching, but lots of what I have found is a bit over my head.

Thanks for the help..

Gaieus

Hi Ross and welcome!

Unfortunately, since SU is a polygon modeller, anything that is "curvy" will be made of smaller or bigger segments. This means, there cannot even be any plugin which could change this as there are no true arcs or circles into which these segmented things could be turned into.

All you can do is to crank up the segment count thus creating smoother curves that could be more seamlessly cut with your machines. Here (at the bottom) is how to modify the segmentation of a circle: http://support.google.com/sketchup/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94740 (arcs work in a similar way).

Note that extreme poly count can slow SU down but if your models are not too complex, you can live with this.

TIG

A 2d DXF export makes everything out of CAD 'lines'.
You can of course [pre]adjust an arc or circle's segmentation, either as you create it [type Ns before entering the radius where N is the number of segments] or you can adjust it later on in 'Entity Info' - provided you haven't incorporated it into a 3d form, when it will become 'fixed'.
You can also [pre]adjust the segment count in other SKP 'curve' types [again provided that they are no yet in a 3d form] by using 'Bezier Tools' [available from the 'Plugins Index' here...].

A 3d DXF export makes SKP arcs/circles as CAD real 'arcs'/'circles' [segmentation is ignored]; however other SKP 'curves' will remain as a collection of line segments.