@tig said:

Have you tried drawing the edges of the road as lines/curves in 3d and using any of the tools I suggested?

The native Sandbox from Contours tool might 'skin' a set of edges for you.

You cannot simple draw two straight pieces of road that crash into each other and expect a magic tool to sort out the 'transitions' needed.

Okay now I see why you did not understand why I could not get jist of it. The sentance: "Have you tried drawing the edges of the road as lines or curves in 3D and using any of the tools I suggested?" shows that I did not clearly specifiy that in my previous post. To think, all of the things you had told me to do with the sandbox tools, I was doing but did not mention that, but instead I was using the sandbox tools by picking one road at a time instead of using the whole map. Therefore when I stamped an intersected road on top of a previous stampped area, it would not come out as a smooth transition between the 2 intersections. Sadly, that it took this many post, when technically I should of just asked how could I make my flat road map follow the contour of my terrain.

I will try this out and get back to you if I have anymore problems, and thanks agian.

Tig and others,
did I say something wrong? I do not think it was wrong to ask if it can be explained in a bit easier way. Please remember, although maybe this topic is a bit more advaanced, I am still a newbie to Sketchup. Also, did forget to mention how percise this needs to be. Being this would be for a video game that I would like to develope, my goal is to have enough detail for the player to walk on. Therefore, I need this just enough so that curbs and the street are defined but yet low enough poly for a video game.

@tig said:

Seems to me the ShapeBender tool isn't [as fine as it is] the tool of choice in this situation.
You want to make two roads at different gradients meet nicely - just like they would if properly engineered and constructed in the real world.
A road doesn't slavishly follow the terrain but has sweetly swept gradients and bends to ensure it works safely...
The Sandbox Drape of a road layout will not get you what you want and it's just lines onto a surface.
The Sandbox Stamp tool, which will make cuttings and embankments, is more like you need...
However you first need to construct a realistic road surface to 'stamp'.
I suggest you might forget about the curbs and add those later - just how realistic does this need to get ?
My ExtrudeEdges... tools and Fredo's CurviLoft tools will probably be best to make swept surface between some curves that you weld up to form road perimeters and cross-sections...[attachment=0:38eyhf0e]<!-- ia0 -->Capture.PNG<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:38eyhf0e]

Hi Tig,
I am sorry that I took so long to respond back, but I was trying to play with the different tools that you have mentioned. I was a little confused with your explaination, but one thing I do agree on and understand, is that it is much easier to create the road surface on the terrain and worry about the curbs latter. I guess the biggest problem I have is wondering if in real life the left and right sides of the streets are perfectly parallel to each other. If I picture it in my head, this is what I have came upon.

Starting with if the both sides of a road are not parallel to each other, then the road can get severly lopsided in areas. An example of this case would be, one side you see houses sitting on hills and the other side is more flat. This also applies to roads that intersect. On the other hand, if both sides the road are constructed to be parallel, this seems to solve the lopsided issue but then it can cause problems with intersected roads, like the above pictures.

You have drawn an example, but it still does not clearly show how you did it, step by step. If by all means, could you elaberate on this a bit more? I would greatly appreciate it.

Dave, not one thing you said made sense in helping to resolve my issue.

@dave r said:

Think about it. If these were real roads, would they meet this way? I doubt it. Something has to happen to at least one of the roads to prevent that valley.

that is my question. Is there something or some tool that could fix this valley? Or, how could I have prevent it after I had drapped my line over a hilly terrain and before using the shapebend plugin?

@dave r said:

Your image doesn't really give much to go on. And it doesn't show up in the thread, either.

Sorry about that.

Also, I will not be able to simply use the the intersect feature, because there is a huge slope difference and my curbs are drawn out as well. I will post better pictures. I hope this clarifies things up. Please let me know...

okay,
so i decided to use the shapebend tool, since it was giving better results. Howver, how can I intersect these 2 roads? also, please ignore the blue line. It's Sketchup's blue axis.

here is example

@sketchymick said:

Hi, see my post, which is number 11 on this page http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=40331&start=15. I hope this helps

• Mick

Mick,
I almost had the same theory, well at least the stamp tool part, but at the time, I was having a problem with the stamp tool. However, updating Sketchup seemed to fix the probem hopefully.

pbacot,
If I understand Mick correctly cutting the road out is done by, with the line tool, draw a line path in the center of the road path image. Next move the line path above the the terrain, and use the drape tool. This will create a duplicate of your line path, but following the contour of the terrain. Once the drape tool has finished, select the faces of the terrain and hide them to make it easier to select the path, as this line will be in pieces. The next thing and to make things easier, you can use the weld plugin, which welds all of the line segments into one polyline segement. Now move the polyline to one side of the road and duplicate the same polyline and move that to the other side of the road. With the 2 polylines created, I think it is possible to close them to make a face by drawing a line at each end, giving you 4 lines and a face in the middle. You can then tripple click this.

@mitcorb said:

Well, I guess we can rule out everything on the prior assumption that your Sketchup install is stable. And, I regret that I, we could not provide a solution.
You may have moved on from here, as I see you have another post in the forum. I could suggest perhaps doing a re-install, but I cannot definitely say that the install is the problem.
I do hope you can work this out.

Mitcorb,
Although you may have not found a solution, it is the contribution of you putting your thoughts and helping out that counts, and I really do appreciate your help. As for thinking I have moved on, that is not so. My other post is part of the same project. What happend was, I started with testing to see if the Instant Road plugin would suit my needs. Appearently, it is not the appropiate plugin for me as of right now, since at the moment, the plugin does not support closed road paths. I had an idea well maybe if I could get some kind of road drawing, it might be possible to stamp it onto the terrain. I was then testing out the drape and stamp tools, and appearently realizing that I was having a problem with the stamp tool. That is where I came here first, just to ask to see if it was me that I was doing something wrong. After I had posted here mentioning to you that it worked for Charley, I began to think that there was something wrong with my installation. That is when I thought of going to the other board and ask if there was another route. Appearently however, I see that someone had posted the same concept I was thinking of doing with my roads. I really do not want to jinks myself, but after reinstalling sketchup, it said there was an update to sketchup. Once I had installed the update in a different folder, all of the Sandbox tools are now working (knock on wood, knock knock :k-knock:)

I have tried the istant road plugin, which my road requires to many closed in loops, and I was told that the plugin doesn't support as of yet. I also tried the drape tool, but then I could not push the surface down and it both curve paths where not equally the same. So I am wonder how would others make road paths on a terrain while also being able to push the road paths down to create the curb prior to the istant road plugin?

@mitcorb said:

I apologize if I misunderstood. And you're right that the terrain doesn't have to be a group. I just looked at your skp. I copied your geometry to the side and worked on that.
Here are some observations, conditions:

1. The site terrain is 2400' long x 1050'. I did not intentionally change any units, in case you use metric.
2. The building is a group, has these extents: 500'x ~382'x ~109' tall. The parapet on top is 8' thick and the height above the roof is ~6'-10 11/16."
3. The terrain surface is currently gridded predominantly on ~150' frequency. Yet the radius for the Smoove tool said 30'.

Depending if this is just an experiment or that building is a specific, real world project, you may wish to resize it to more realistic dimensions. The dimensions of the parapet are what suggest this.

Although my proportion are off, and yes it is just an experiment, Charly said that my file worked for him. That does not make sense that my proportion are the culp0rit and from what harly has said that proves my point. I am wondering if my Version of Sketchup, which is 8.0.11752, has a bug. Is there a patch for this?

@mitcorb said:

If you want the Smoove tool to work minimally, you need to increase the radius so that it encompasses more than the 150' grid spacing, say 4 or 5 times that. Alternatively, select the terrain, go to the toolbar and call the Add Detail tool. This will effectively subdivide/double the grid frequency. I would probably click it again, just to see how fat the file gets. I hope this may help. And thanks, Karl

I think I have mentioned this before, but so that there is no confusions, I had even tried upto 1000' radius as well as manually selected an area of the terrain and still nothing would happen. I think this also falls with the same problem as with the stamp tool in which my version of Sketchup has a bug.

mitcorb,
I did not explain myself clearly. What I ment to say was, fig1. is the image of me trying to use the smoove tool in edit mode. Meaning I did NOT explode the terrain, rather I had right clicked on the terrain and chose edit group. Also the image itself should show that it is in edit mode because it has the dotted square box around the terrain. Besides the point, explode mode or edit mode, it did not matter. Neither modes did not display any yellow dots after setting a desired radius. In addition, I could set the radius to 0.0001" or 1" or 1' or 10' or 100' or 1000'. It did not matter, I got nothing and when I clicked on an area anyways, nothing would happen. I even tried your other method of selecting parts of the mesh and clicked and dragged and still nothing would happen.
As for Fig2., this is an image of me trying to use the stamp tool. As previous, I did say that I have tried following a few youtube vides, one of them being this one... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcbIZFn6-mQ
... and the second one ashttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwHdSVqUCac&feature=fvwrel

after following both vids and trying it myself, this is what happens....

1. preselect the object that I want to stamp to, and as soon as i click on the stamp tool, it spits out the above error. Which means it doesn't even give me a chance to do anything.

stamp-not-working.skp

ok, I have tried my best but I am not piticulary sure what you are exactly looking for. However, Fig1 shows that I am in edit mode, and there are no yellow dots around radius cursor. Fig2. shows you that the terrain has been exploded prior to using the stamp tool.

Hi. I have been watching some youtube videos, discussing about how you can make a flat surface for your objects to sit on the terrain, by using the Sandbox Stamp tool. I have a Windows 7 and running Sketchup 8 free, and I have enabled Sandbox. I am not sure what I am doing wrong, but I am absolutly possitive that I following the videos to the t, but when I do it, I get an error stating that it was an "invalid selection! There are no non-vertical faces to stamp to."

Here is how I am doing it. I draw a new terrain with the create terrain. I would then explode the terrain. Then, I have to manully select the faces and push/pull them to form my shape, because it appears that the smoove tool doesn't work either. I then drew a box and grouped it and moved it over and above the terrain. While the box still selected, I then pick the stamp tool and it immediately throws that error.

As for the smoove tool, I click on an area of the terrain and nothing happens.