Bending Tools and broken Surfaces
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Hey,
my name is Christian, i´m new to this forum and i´m using Sketchup for about two month now. First of all i want to thank you all you guys who regulary post here and especially those who create all the wonderful plugins that made sketchup a usable program.Over the last few month i did learn al lot by reading in this forum. Now however i have a problem i can´t really solve by myself... Here it is:
I wanted to create a belt buckle. Basically it should be a circle on the one axis and circular on the other. ( I hope you understand what i mean, kind of like a ball cut in two. ) So far it was no problem...
For the fornt surface i created an eagle-symbol. I desinged it apard from the buckle and i desingned it on an even ground, without rounding. The symbol is quite detailed and i had to use curviloft and other plugins to skin almost any surface . (Especailly at the wings...).The Problems occured when i wanted to combine the two objects. I though i could create the symbol and then bend it on two axises, so that it would fit to the surface of the buckle. I tried the two Plugins i have for bending, shape bender (by Fullmer) and radial bending (by Fredo6)(Both downloaded Dec. 2013). They did bent it fine, but in the process, they totally destoyed the surfaces. I mean it´s not like it broke in one or two place, it´s not even like it broke on multiple places, it was totally destoyed and way beyond reparable...
I would want to avoid drawing the symbol new, diretly on the round surface. This would be a pain in the ... . Therefor, has anybody a tip for me how i can bend objekts, even highly detailed objects with multiple surfaces, without or at least with minimum damage to those surface?
Thanks for your help,
Cheers Christian -
Hi and welcome !
Can you share the file ?
Radial bending should work just fine if applied properly with dividing the geometry.
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The most likely reason is you are modelling too small. If the faces created in the bending process are very small they won't form properly. Scale your model up by 10 or 100 and try again. If it works then scale back down by the same factor.
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Box beat me too it...
Here's more detail...
If you have modeled the belt-buckle at actual size and it is very detailed you will get some very tiny facets.
When these get 'bent' the chances are that at least some of them will be subdivided even smaller.
SketchUp has a known limitation - although edges less than ~0.1mm or 1/1000th inch can exist they cannot be created [I know that sounds silly but read on...].
It's inbuilt tolerances need to decide if points are coincident or not, so they might be used to make geometry [edges], if two points are almost coincident [to the above limits] then SketchUp takes them as coincident, therefore the tiny edge that the points might define is not created as its ends are assumed coincident, although in reality they'd be a tiny distance apart.
Without one if its edges the related face can't form.
Without the face you get tiny holes in your bent geometry.This kind of issue is also seen in native tools like FollowMe on finely faceted small tubes going around tight radius arcs - where the creation of the tiniest innermost facets can fail...
The workaround is to Scale the small object - say x1000.
Then do the bending [or whatever].
Now the smallest facets are unlikely to fall into the tolerance-trap... and all geometry should be made.
When it's done Scale down to the original size [you might need to do x0.01 [1/100] and then x0.1 [1/10] because 1/1000 is too big in one step-down].
It should scale-down keeping the geometry intact...
So - as I said earlier - the tiny facets can exist - but they can't be created... -
With all of that in mind, you may also want to consider making a copy of your object before performing any major changes to protect from loss during a crash. Also, become familiar with Groups and Components as part of your practice, if you do not already use them.
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Thanks so far for the fast and informative answers. Some surfaces are very small indeed and scaling up sounds like a very good idea. I should have thought about that myself...
I will give it a try tomorrow and will report the results.
@mitcorb: Of course i save and copy my work regularly and especially before any major changes. That´s a lesson i learned long ago with Computers.
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Thanks so much guys, it worked. I scaled it up by 10000 und then used Fredo´s bending tool. I still have minor surface damages, but nothing i couldnt repair.
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