Hi guys,

I came across this problem when trying to dimension something in LayOut and saw that when drawing in inches you can't dimension in a tighter tolerance than 0.01". I was digging around to find out what was going on with that, and came across this post from Google employee John Bacus:

@unknownuser said:

As you can imagine, we do care quite a lot about precision/accuracy in LayOut's dimensioning system. In fact, we limit the precision for decimal inches to .01" because we can't certify that values in the thousandths of an inch are correct in all cases. For the majority of our users, this isn't an issue– they are doing either architectural or furniture scaled work where thousandth of an inch are just not relevant. But I can easily understand how unsatisfying this is for those working at a machinist's tolerances.

Unfortunately, this isn't just an issue in LayOut. SketchUp can't really work to .001" precision either. As you approach entities of .001" in length or less, you'll find that faces in the model won't close and SketchUp will begin reporting validity problems. The only real solution to this is to scale the entire model up by some multiplier.

nspies: If you haven't already found it, you can limit the precision of your dimensions in LayOut by choosing 1/8" from the "Precision" menu in the Dimension Style panel.

hope this helps-
john

The dimensions in LayOut is not that big of a concern for me, but I am a little worried about his statement that SU won't work to 0.001" precision and once you go that small things don't really work right.

When I go to WINDOW > MODEL INFO > UNITS, I am able to select tolerances MUCH smaller than 0.01", and when I import items as .DXF files everything seems to measure out to the dimensions that they were originally drawn in (originals were drawn in TurboCAD).

So my question is this: Has this issue has been resolved with the update from SU7 to SU8, or is drawing things to 0.001" tolerance still unreliable as John stated in his comment?

I know some people use the workaround where they draw everything in feet and then scale down by a factor of 12, but obviously I'd like to avoid doing that if I can.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Travis

Just did the selecting units thing on the options button. Works like a champ to prevent it from being 12x as big.

Still pretty new to the program so not really familiar with the drape tool. I'll read up on it and give it a shot.

Thanks so much for the advice!

bagger05

pbacot,

Thanks for the response. I'll try out your suggestions.

RE: 3D in TurboCAD, I know that TurboCAD will provide me with the same functionality that SketchUp is giving me, but the interface is in TurboCAD is not what I would describe as very intuitive or easy to use. I'm the only one at the company who has any real CAD experience, and mine was years ago in college. For what we're doing, I think that SketchUp is a much easier tool to use. If everyone here was really CAD-savvy then I think we'd just stick with TurboCAD, but SketchUp has a much shallower learning curve in my opinion.

Sorry if this has already been discussed on the forums. If so, please direct me to a thread that talks about these issues.

I am in the trial period for SU Pro and have some files in TurboCAD that I want to make 3D in SU. A couple of interesting problems:

1. I will save my TurboCAD file as a DXF and import it from the File menu in SU. When it is imported, my drawing that was drawn 20" across is now ENORMOUS. 20x or 30x as big. It doesn't always do this, and I didn't want to waste my precious 8 hours of trial time to try to figure out an answer to a problem that might already have a solution.

2. When I import a DXF file, only the outlines are shown. Even though they are closed contours, nothing has a face. When I start to "trace" over the lines to create faces, sometimes connected closed contours will become faces without me drawing on them. Is there a good way to make it where all closed contours are faces?

3. When I export a file as a DXF, circles become polygons when I open up those drawings in another program. Any way around this?

I'm trying to decide whether or not SU Pro is the right tool for my company, so as I go through this trial, I'm sure that I'll have more questions. Again, if there are answers to these things out there somewhere (or even better, if a SU Pro FAQ exists somewhere) then please point me there and I'll stop bothering everyone.

THANKS!

As always, I'm blown away by how good at this stuff y'all are. And so grateful that everyone is always so willing to help out the new guys like me.

pbacot, I absolutely love your suggestion about "scoring" the bendlines and just using the rotate tool to do the bending. I'm going to give that a whirl and see how it goes. I'll let y'all know how it works.

Thanks again for the advice.

bagger05

Hey guys, thanks for the responses.

I agree that it would probably just be easier to extrude the shape. However, what I was hopefully trying to get to eventually is to draw the sheet flat and then export it to a DXF file so that it can be read by our punch machine software to cut holes in it. Then add the thickness of the metal, then bend it, then assemble this piece with other pieces that my company uses to make the sheet metal boxes. There would be lots of value in the drawing process following along with the manufacturing process so that we could easily provide drawings to the guys in the plant along the way (assembly drawings, layout drawings, etc) as well as drawings of our finished product to the customer. So far SketchUp has been very easy to use and I've only been tinkering with it on my own away from work for a few weeks. For the 3D finished products it absolutely blows away TurboCAD which is what we're using now.

If we could get the hang of the bending then we might be able to ditch TurboCAD entirely.

I'll go back and re-read that original post with the plug-in. Dave, did you notice anything specifically just from glancing at it that was causing it to screw up?

Thanks again for the help.

bagger05

Does Shape Bender make 90* bends? I want to draw a piece of sheet metal and bend the edges of it (just like we would do in our press). Does Shape Bender just not handle 90* bends?

.skp is attached. The line that is bent is what I want the outer dimensions of my shape to be. I'm new to the forums so sorry if this has been covered. Thanks in advance for your help.

sheet metal.skp

Gai,

I exploded the component and then sent to eDrawings and the color is no longer an issue.

Dave,

I am new to the program so am not familiar with "flip along" but I did move/copy the component and simply rotate it 180 deg. This also prevents the color issue. Unfortunately that solution would only work for boxes that are exactly symmetrical.

I also tried this:

I deleted the copied component (which was scaled to make it an opposite). Exploded the original component, copy/moved it, scaled the copied piece to -1 making it an opposite, turned both into components, joined them together, and then sent it to eDrawings. No color problems.

Obviously this is an issue for scaled components, not scaling in general. So that's good.

Attached (color problem).

The half that is situated on the origin is the original creation, the one closer to the camera is the copy. The copy is the one that appears black in eDrawings.

I have a variation on this drawing with a cutout (color problem 2). In this drawing, the half of the box on the origin is the original creation, but the end piece with the cutout is a separate component. The half of the box that is closer to the camera was copy/moved and scaled to -1 like I described in the original post and appears black in eDrawings. The end piece with the cutout was copy/moved, but was NOT scaled and made into an opposite. In eDrawings, both end pieces appear gray as they do in SketchUp.

So it appears that the color problem is caused by the fact that the component was made into an opposite. Is this a known issue with a good workaround? Obviously I could just create the opposite half as a separate component and that might solve the problem, but since most of what I draw are boxes made up of two halves, that would make each drawing take twice as long.

Thanks for the help,
bagger05

color problem.skp

color problem 2.skp

I have drawn a box in SketchUp (free version - 8.0.14346). The box was drawn in two symmetrical halves. I created the first half, made it a component, copy/moved the component, scaled it by -1 on the center grip (to make an opposite), and then moved the new half into place butted up against the first half. I painted the component gray (which of course made the other component gray as well), and then exported the drawing to eDrawings.

When eDrawings opened, one half of the box was gray, the other half was black.

Does anyone know why this happened?

Thanks in advance,
bagger05