Hi, Just a follow up.

I've attached a photo of the final model including 3d printed parts and 5kg of tinted black resin for the water and a welded steel stand consisting of 18 unsupported legs.

If your interested you can see the rest of the project which is now on my website, all modelled in sketchup and rendered manually in photoshop. - I still have a lot of images to add but you can scroll down to view whats there at the minute.

http://www.lukeriggall.co.uk/architecture/the-arc-centre

The final master model stats were around 25 million edges, 10 million faces within 400k components, performance was manageable (on 2015) by using layers.

ok I've made the paths (using illustrators join points), imported in SKU again and generated the tubes.
That will do for now, but does anyone know if I can make them droop down in the middle a bit?

Basically I would need to convert each edge into an arc and then run the lines2tubes again.

Any idea how to do this?

@tig said:

If you want a 'tube' then this will add tubes to selected edges...
You can adjust the diameter, reduce the number of sides etc...
http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=lines2tubes

That would be good, might be the way to go, can it 'droop' a little between end points of the line? (i.e. 150mm droop) a slight arc

@tig said:

Sam D Mitch made a tool to link cpoints.
http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?pln=Connect_Guide_Points
If you make the connected edges you could then use a tool [I think SDM also has one - 'Add&AlignComponent' ?] to replace selected edges with say a cube component which is inserted at each edge's start, then stretched along that edge direction/length.
Visit his web-site for more info/ideas... http://sdmitch.blogspot.co.uk/

Many thanks TIG as always, a great idea.

I'm connect the points manually as no program will know which points to connect to another.
So now I'm looking to replace the edges with a component which is rotated and stretched.

I've installed the plugin you recommended but its not doing what I hoped.

Hi,

I have 2000 points which I need to connect up using the same component.

Essentially this is a walkway and the points are where the posts come up.
I'd like to add rope between each point (nearest points) as a kind of hand rail, and it would be good for performance if that span of rope between each point was the same component but rotated and stretched/scaled along a single axis.

I have attached my points for your reference.

Does anyone know how I could do this?

The only alternative for me would be to draw up them all and extrude it pretending its good enough.
I don't have time to move & copy, rotate and then scale every block individually.

points.skp

Completed!

Took 60 hours on the CNC milling bed using a 6mm drill bit, I wanted smaller but it was unrealistic.
from 36mm Birch plywood (2x 18mm 4' x 4').

Next stages for it are to fill in areas of water with resin, not decided on the colour or to leave it clear yet though!
And 3D printed buildings will be set on top of that.

I will also use the digital model for some renders.

Many thanks for the help everyone, its looking fantastic, I think ely862me's version has worked the best as it is the healthiest and has the most detail.

I'll be sure to post final photographs up when I can!

ely862me: It would be good if you could explain your workflow? Just that there seems to be a noise where I would expect flat surfaces, I actually quite like it but just wondered if you did it in a more powerful program like the suggested blender? or wether it is in fact from sketchup?

Many thanks again, excellent help from the guru's!

@ely862me said:

Actually it did it quite fast and it is not that much of a deal. Just an i7 3770, others than processor speed is not important with sketchup. The eaten memory is just 3.5 gb.
I am trying to clean it up by bits to not draw it into the not responding mode.

Question: Why don't use the cam program that creates the code for the cnc? Usually these programs have the ability to create mesh from bitmaps.

Excellent,

Really? I spoke to them any they said they couldn't so been trying all day to do it this way instead.

edit: Plus I need this anyway for the master model for render to be fair.

or maybe run CleanUp first?

@ely862me said:

127 mb

Wow how on earth did your machine do that?!

Does it zip for dropbox etc...?