Drawing And Then Editing On Terrain Or Curved Surfaces
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Hi Mitcorb,
Thanks very much for your reply. When I drape something onto a terrain, it doesn't end up as a group, it ends up as part of the topography. Am I doing something wrong there ? Secondly, even if it was a group an arc ends up split into individual, small sections of an arc, making editing far more tricky.
For those of you that don't deal with terrains, perhaps think of applying a line drawn pattern to a vase and then wanting to edit that pattern. The pattern may start of as simple lines, arcs and circles but once draped onto the vase, they become far more complicated / split "components" of those lines and arcs.
I hope that makes sense and I'm sure there's a simple answer because surely this is something encountered regularly when trying to draw and edit designs onto curved surfaces like those in cars, vases and terrains ?
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Hi, Calstock:
Glad you replied back. I think I see a little more in there.
It would help if you could post either an image of what you are working on, or at least a portion of the model in skp (v6 or v8), so that others can also help get you to the goal.Your vase analogy does help, however, the application of the design to the side of a vessel would be better achieved with projection methods, or intersections.
With regard to the fragmentation of the curves after engagement with the rest of the model, there is a plugin called Weld. There is also Recurve, and Curvizard.
Comment back.
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Thanks for your help and patience Mitcorb. Here's a Dropbox link to a mocked up model to try to explain what I'm trying to do:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfmicfwe406w6ag/drawing%20and%20editing%20on%20terrains.skp
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Calstock,
What you have here might be a question of selection. You have to select only the right parts of your terrain to make it reeditable in your process.
What you should add to your workflow is that you should soften/smooth all terrain edges before draping. After that, just find your own methods of selection of draped curves, so you don't destroy original terrain info. The plugin that helps me the most with terrain curves is select curve from Thomthom
Most importantly, if you have to reshape a complex mesh or erase something to create holes, don't do it!!! Hide stuff, group it, copy it, "backup" it, make component and "save as" external file. Any method is good but erase and loose all those hard to remake polygons.
If you don't think this as anything to do with what you want... watch the video:
http://screencast.com/t/ADucyyw1
I hope this helps,
JQL
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@Calstock:
I think JQL has a very good example addressing this question, and his comments are very helpful. -
Thanks guys, some great advice there. I would normally soften the terrain, I didn't in the example I gave because I didn't realise it would affect the answers I'd receive. Good point to note for future questions that one.
The ThomThom curve finder plugin I didn't have and it's a great tool - thanks for that. This will definitely come in useful on future models.
The tip about hiding things rather than deleting them is something I do elsewhere in models quite often but for some reason I wasn't doing it when doing this task - good tip.
Although it's not a huge problem, we still seem to be in agreement you need to create and preserve a "flat plane" editing layer where you do all your adjustments. This is then used to drape the edited version of the path, (or whatever), onto the terrain. I know I can use plugins to draw directly onto the surface as well but I find getting the curves and tangents I want easier on a flat plane. So on that point I guess you don't necessarily have to have an editing layer, it's just easier for some tasks.
My next question, (if I'm not pushing my luck), would be how to easily apply a texture to the draped footpath without it being distorted into loads of different directions.
Sketchup - where would be without excellent forums like Sketchucation and where would we be without plugins !
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Apply teture. Turn on hidden geometry. Select a face and choose contextual menu texture / projected. Sample that face with the paint bucket tool. Turn OFF hidden geometry and apply the projected texture to the full surface.
There are plugins and ways to get a natural tiling pattern or even quad-mesh UV mapping based on the geometry of the object, but this projected texture is the simplest and easiest. Fredo ThruPaint and SketchUV are a couple of plugins that can help texturing multifaceted surfaces. -
Thanks a million - I just tried that and it worked a treat.
It's not just me is it - this texturing question for instance is not that easy to find out on your own.
@pbacot said:
Apply teture. Turn on hidden geometry. Select a face and choose contextual menu texture / projected. Sample that face with the paint bucket tool. Turn OFF hidden geometry and apply the projected texture to the full surface.
There are plugins and ways to get a natural tiling pattern or even quad-mesh UV mapping based on the geometry of the object, but this projected texture is the simplest and easiest. Fredo ThruPaint and SketchUV are a couple of plugins that can help texturing multifaceted surfaces. -
You found it by your own questions here... so it's easy
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Hi, Calstock:
Easy is a relative term.
You can, while working, use the help available at the top line menu. Help>Knowledge Center, which takes you to help.sketchup.com, on which you can search for your answers. You can also use your favorite search engine and find loads of information, video tutorials, such as from YouTube.
If you are logged in to Sketchucation, you can do a search by typing in keywords in the search box at the very top of this page.
I am glad these other folks were able to help you. -
It seems texture support was only taken so far in SU to accommodate the basic flat surface modeling. Organic modeling wasn't a priority. Therefore it appears to the user that tools are lacking.
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