Thanks John; but personally I think of it as something akin to OCD when faced with redundant polygons.

Hi guys, I thought you might be interested to know that we've revamped the FormFonts Exchange to make it essentially the same as the old Objective Networks (for youngsters...that was the precursor of both FormFonts itself and the 3D Warehouse...who 'borrowed' the old ON interface pretty much lock stock and barrel)
We are aiming to still keep it professionally useful, so it will be moderated with a light touch to keep out suspect content and to prevent it being overwhelmed by junk.

As with any such setup, it does require registration, but after that you can upload/download to your heart's content...we have removed the one download for one upload restriction. We will not be having anything as crass as a ratings system, but you can now comment on models. You can also add any extra search terms that you think might be useful to yourself or others. I hope you find it a useful resource.

Please take a moment or two to read the uploading guidelines, which do nothing more than outline how to display your models to best advantage...and if you feel like showing off your rendering skills by submitting photoreal thumbnails, like we have on the main site, that would be welcome too.

You can find the Exchange at http://www.formfonts.com/index.php?area=All&site=1.

That makes me so sad...and so young. Steve will be sadly missed by all us old timers. We got on really well when we finally met up at the first base camp in Boulder. His Tips & Tricks thread and constant stream of advice were of huge benefit to all early adopters of SU...far more so than any official support forum. I still have an archived version he sent me on CD after the old @Last forum finally closed its doors.
As others have said; a great guy with a great personality.

RIP Steven.

Many Congrats, Chris. I guess you'll be trading the surfboard for a trail bike now.

Hi Shanna,
I've done a ton of this kind of content over the years. I'd go with everything so far said...Artisan almost indispensable for certain types of content, as was it's predecessor Subdivide and Smooth. Round Corners and Chris Fulmer's Shape Bender are also really helpful. I'd also recommend looking at either (or both) Fredo's or TIG's various lofting and skinning plugins...very useful for handling stuff like this Butterfly Chair, in which the outline might be a little more critical than you can achieve by using Artisan's proxy morphing. Then, having got yourself a single skin, there's Fredo's Joint Push Pull if you need to give it some volume.

I realise that, Simon. yes, it certainly can be done. Just make sure you have enough construction geometry drawn onto the terrain before unwrapping it...otherwise it's going to be pretty featureless and difficult to judge what to paint where on the map.

@cotty said:

In SketchUp, you can use the Paint Brush from Artisan.

That's how I did my mesh above.

This thread is well on the way to overtaking the 'Do we have a joke thread goin here?' started 5 years ago.
Next stop 'Some Funny Pics'

No Jeff, it's not sheer luck...it's sheer common sense. It works in the case of the circle specifically because it always bisects the angle between two adjacent sides.
In the case of an arc that is only what you require...and nothing more, it doesn't have any adjacent side to bisect the angle with. So it simply reveals its true nature as an extrude tool.

Give it the information it requires...at the correct angle...ie one extra segment at both ends, which it can screw up to it's heart's content (for perfectly logical reasons)...and it's perfectly accurate on the remainder.

It doesn't change its behaviour, it just seems to. It still offsets against the edges, but the figures reverse-engineer to to give the correct offset at the vertices, not edge to edge. That skewed profile in the middle figure is only 8 59/64" deep...not the 9" I originally drew it, nor the 9" it ends up as being.
If you were to continue that profile along the edge of a box, for instance, people would then be complaining that the edge to edge offset was wrong.
That might not matter to you, as you deal almost exclusively in curves; but it matters to a lot of other people.

I can't believe I'm having exactly the same conversation now, I had with a newbie nearly 10 years ago.

Depending on the complexity of your designs, you can even go as low as 4 sides on what is supposedly a round piece of wire. SU's smoothing facility will make such elements still appear to be round. All these wires are only square-section. It can save a lot of geometry if the curves are complex.
It's better to save polygons on the cross-section than on the profile of the curves...and end up having the curves looking clunky.

@desertraven said:

This is the promise from the Sketchup web site:

@unknownuser said:

Follow Me: Create complex extrusions and lathed forms

You use SketchUp's innovative, do-everything Follow Me tool to create 3D forms by extruding 2D surfaces along predetermined paths. Model a bent pipe by extruding a circle along an L-shaped line. Create a bottle by drawing half of its outline, then using Follow Me to sweep it around a circle. You can even use Follow Me to round off (fillet) edges on things like handrails, furniture and electronic gadgets.

No warnings stating that there are problems and unexpected results.

But that's quite obviously the sales pitch, not Technical Support. When have you EVER seen caveats included in a sales pitch...except on some cigarette or financial services ads, where it is a legal requirement.

There is nothing in the paragraph above that is not true. You can even still use the Follow Me Tool to achieve an absolutely accurate version of such a lathed shape that isn't a 'Total Screw Up'. You can also use TIG's EE by Lathe or Fredo's Curviloft to achieve exactly the same absolute precision. So there is clearly nothing wrong with the background calculations taking place within the core program. The fault lies with the person using those tools in an inappropriate manner.

SketchUp can be learnt within hours...but only the broad sweep of it, used for general modelling. Anyone wanting to achieve absolute precision in all circumstances is going to have to put the time in, as they would on any other software. It specifically mentions circle in that blurb above. As I've already stated a couple of times, that is the one specific instance that the Extrude Tool can be used as an accurate Lathe Tool.

Having seen that it doesn't work on anything less than a circle, I see no sense in continuing to try to knock a square peg into a round hole by using it on smaller arcs, then complaining that it doesn't work properly. That's a classic case of the poor workman blaming the tools. It does work...if you use it properly.

This is not complacency, it's simply being realistic. I can sympathise with Jeff's demands for stuff like an Offset Tool that works in a consistent way with the Circle and Arc Tools. I would like to see, for instance, a circle...when extruded to a simple, unedited cylinder...transfer its properties to that cylinder. I know we can now still edit the radius (which was not always the case) but how about still being able to edit the number of segments? We're only talking about a cylinder here, not some coiled length of hosepipe.
I do think that some of Jeff's expectations are probably unacheivable. A polygon modeller is not a NURBS modeller...and never will be.

One of the main tenets of SU development has always been that it ought to be able to play nicely with other software. So if you absolutely require something (like precisely intersecting arcs) that can only be modelled in NURBS (or a 2D bezier drafter) then use that and import them when done. If I want to do proper UV mapping, I use TIG's proxy script to talk to UU3D and do it there.

On the other hand, I don't have any sympathy with people using the existing software inappropriately; and then blaming the software. These arguments about SU being able to handle every conceivable contingency as opposed to the KISS approach have been raging for at least a decade. I can remember all the desperate pleas for a raytracer to be included (before we had Podium or anything else)...I had to export to Vue and do it there. The dev team resisted; and now we have more renderers than you can shake a stick at, without further complicating the basic GUI or the usability of the program.

Getting back to the title of the thread. Yes, there can be some inaccuracies (due mostly to SU not handling true curves) i don't know if they can ever be entirely resolved; but I'm hoping the devs will at least try to push the envelope. But, in my experince, most inaccuracy lies between chair and keyboard.

Hi Simon, I suggest you take your lead from the gaming industry. produce a set of integrated textures; that is...a basic seamless grass, the same grass with scattered leaves, the same grass with denser leaves, or bare/muddy/stony patches.
Same again for stony or paved areas.
Obviously, SU can't layer these textures like some other programs or games can, however you can paint directly onto the triangulations or use Tools on Surface to mark out irregular patches which you can paint with all the variations. That gives you complete flexibility as to what goes where.
A very quick example looks like this.

Very few such complex tools work in more than a limited number of situations, Jeff. You might think that asking for an Offset Tool that simply offsets from vertices in the way you describe would do the trick...but it doesn't.

@unknownuser said:

it would only offset vertices.. if it's an endpoint of an edge, it moves perpendicular ..if it's a vertex of a curve, it moves on a vector which bisects the angle of adjacent vertices.. (though this would only truly work on arc..

As you point out, this would only work on arcs. But it's worse than that...it would only work on convex arcs. Try it on a concave arc...of the type commonly found in framing, coving etc. and what you get is this.

This is precisely why I accept that many such things are only 1 level deep; and don't keep bitching that any particular tool isn't a magical cure-all.

Lathed hemisphere using Follow Me. I rest my case. SU thinks it's an extrusion; the developers seem to think it's an extrusion.

I absolutely agree. Thom...especially an intuitive Revolve/Lathe tool that works pretty much like Follow Me; and an Offset tool that accurately offsets vertices on a curve, but edge perpendiculars on everything else.

Having said that, we already have tools that do at least some of what is being asked for. This is Olav's last example...but done using Curviloft, not Follow Me. Seen from underneath, all those radii (including the end ones) are exactly the same length.

{Edit} I see TIG beat me to some of this.

Sorry Jeff, it's not me indulging in semantics ...it's you. The Follow Me Tool is most definitely an extrude tool, not a rotate tool. I've already pointed out the single instance in which it can be used as a form of rotate tool...a complete 360 degree lathe....and page after page of this thread has been devoted to various people zeroing in on that one specific aspect and complaining about the fact that you can't downsize it to a 180 or 90 degree turn. You can't...it's 360 or nothing.

You know as well as I do that any extrude tool worthy of the name can extrude along a path, not just the contrived example you posted...which is more akin to Vector P/P...but along a curved path, not a single vector. It is, in fact, a loft operation. Did you construct it manually, or did you simply use Loft along Path?

Follow Me has an infinity of uses beyond its very narrow use covered in these ages. You can't possibly claim it's any kind of revolve tool when it's used to extrude a profile along paths like these hydraulic pipes. Of course it's an extrude tool...but your definition of what an extrude tool ought to do would have it maintaining the orientation of the original circle as it follows the path around those bends. That would produce a totally ludicrous result.
Any kind of Rotate Tool would require you to define the axis of rotation and then specify the degree of rotation about that axis...producing exactly what Olav would like to see; and exactly what you have to do when 'programming' a dynamic door component, for example. We don't have that...because we don't have a Rotate Tool.

Olav, in the case of the arches, wouldn't it make more sense not to bisect the circle until after you have offset it? And when you offset it, just ignore the value in the Measurement box, but offset by inferencing across the top of the established pillar?
That way, you not only avoid all the nonsense of having to deal with little line stubs, but you also get an entirely consistent vertex to vertex distance up the pillar and right around the arch.
Or am I missing something?

You're likely to get as many suggestions as users. However this thread might provide some useful info, as it contains quite a few screenshots...not only of people's Plugins folder, but also how they have arranged the resulting toolbars in SU.
It would enable you to compare Plugin collections and see for yourself which are the most popular...rather than taking someone's word for it.

I wouldn't want anyone to imagine that I think SU is 'good enough' either. One of the areas of contention here is down to a basic misunderstanding in terms...I think.

Take the example of Olav's quarter hemisphere. My viewpoint is why would you think that the Follow Me Tool would lathe a quarter turn under those circumstances. In order to do that, it would need to be a Rotate Tool; it isn't, it's an extrude tool...as its name suggests.

While it is true that it can be 'tricked' into being a Rotate Tool in one, very specific circumstance...lathing a profile around a full circle, it can only do that because (a) that extrude path has no beginning or end; and (b) the profile's inner edge just happens to be at the circle's centre. You have to remember, however, that it isn't actually rotating around that central axis...it's extruding along the exterior, circular path.

Like I said, this is one single, specific circumstance. It is not downscaleable to lathing a quarter or half turn...because such a path is not an infinite loop...it has ends...and at those ends Follow me will revert to its true nature as an Extrude Tool, exactly as in Olav's illustration. This is the reason that I claim such a result is neither an error nor is it illogical. It is entirely logical...for an Extrude Tool.

Why SU doesn't actually possess a proper Rotate/Lathe tool after all this time is quite another matter.

I'm not really understanding what the 'error' is in Olav's example. The path appears to be set up to produce two very short, on-axis side segments, joined by a 4 segment arc. Isn't this exactly what Follow Me has done?

I hate to sound like I'm defending SU yet again, but the quadrant below was produced in a single action (using Loft junctions along 2 paths).
You can't realistically expect SU to guess your intentions. If you want a quadrant with two end profiles sharing a common centre of rotation and at right angles to each other, then draw them that way; don't provide SU with a path with which it doesn't stand a cat-in-hells chance of achieving your aim and expect it to magically solve your geometry errors for you.
The same goes for drawing an extrude path using a simple arc...like when you round off the corner of a rectangle, In that situation, neither end segment will be on axis...so you can't realistically expect the resulting end profiles to be either.

I'm not saying that the devs or a Ruby scripter couldn't produce a specific tool for producing such a quadrant (leaving the default extrude action exactly how it is...which works perfectly well in most cases) But there are plenty of ways of achieving the same result at present, including the plugin I used, which took little longer than using Follow me.

@desertraven said:

Well your logic explains what happens through SU, but that does not make the end result a logic conclusion. And if the Joint push pull does the same thing then it needs fixing too.

Edit: I'm glad you are agreeing on the misleading part. Here another example how misleading this tool is: The arch and the 2 lines were offset in one go so they were all 3 selected the result speaks for it's self.

I don't know how much more clearly I can put it; It's not my logic...it's just logic...the logical consequence of offsetting faces, not endpoints. The discrepancy shown in your illustration is the very logical consequence of offsetting a segment normal and not the end point. As long as arcs are measured based on centres and vertices, yet offsets are calculated from edge perpendiculars, that's going to be the result. They are fundamentally incompatible...which is why SU needs to treat arcs differently when offsetting.
It is misleading only in as much as many people might expect the rationale behind arc construction to be carried forward into offsetting...but it isn't.

Fredo's JPP does not need fixing. It works exactly as any reasonable person would expect it to work. What do you propose Push/Pulling if not faces...remembering that there are only faces once you have entered 3D? My whole point in mentioning it was to illustrate that the Offset Tool, in it's present form, is actually an Extrude Tool...but working in 2D.