OK! This gives me a lot to go on, and this is only one of 20 different styles of rail

I'll get trying it, see how quickly i can put this together and maybe just make real dented sections for areas which are fairly standard sizes. Then do as you suggested with textures for the more complex parts. I hadn't thought of this, i'm still getting a feel for the capabilities of this software, let alone how to implement them

Really apreciate the help and instruction, great information.

Thank you.

I'm up to the point now where i have a similar section of rail as yourself Dave.

I have a couple of questions about what you said. How do you set the number of sides on your circle?

My second question would be, is it possible for me to use my single section of railing and make it automatically repeat all along a line in the same way as the follow-me tool does with a face? I'd like to make curves, or arches and fill the whole length with the railing model.

@pbacot said:

You draw edges between the many endpoints along the arcs (SU arcs, of course are really a series of segments). As long as the points are coplanar, they will form a face. If necessary triangular faces can commonly be made. We call it stitching, and if you have to do a lot, you look for another way but it's fine for little fixes.

This is the same arc radial duplicated with the rotate tool.

I understand now what you mean by stitching. I've not heard this term before now. I have made a pretty nice indent now & am copying it down the length of the edge using the move tool, then intersecting the faces so i can delete the centre of the arc on the new copies.

thank you both for your help here.

@pbacot said:

Or just arcs, stitching the faces in between (do you really need the dish effect here)

No i dont need the dishing really. i can just take an arc on the top face and an arc on the side face and connect them somehow. when you say stitch between the arcs, what do you mean, or how is this done?

I apologise for my ignorance with this application but it's completely new to me.

This is looking very good now, i'll do as you say for future projects, but for this, it will be presented to people at something like 1:25 scale, the gaps are only visible when i zoom in to something like 3:1 scale.

I spent hours trying to solve this. Thanks again.

Thank you very much. now it's looking much better. there are TINY little gaps but my model is simply for illustration purposes so this will be great.

@gaieus said:

Maybe the whole model is too tiny (SU has issues with creating small faces). Try to scale it up by 10 or even 100, do the job and if it fills, you can scale it back (SU will support already existing, tiny faces).

Hello, i am new to sketchup and I'm trying to remove curved pieces from the edge of a rectangle. The project is a steel railing with a hammered effect along the edges.

My problem is, as i use the follow tool to create the back wall of what will be my 'dented' area of railing, the edges of the back wall dont fill in. They always remain transparent and i cant seem to find any way to fill these in.

I will attack an image to show you what i'm getting at, The problem area is marked with a red arrow. can anyone help?

thanks