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Ahhh... I should have been more specific.
What I'm trying to do is run text the length of the tube where the text is in the materials texture. It's not this image but something similar. The alignment of the material has to be precise and cannot be distorted by the curved surface.
If you look closely you'll note text is p[laced on three different curved surfaces - side, dome, and end. I need to do all of that.
I need to texture a tube... actually just 1/3rd -- 80 degrees of a tube, with the lower edge of the texture aligned to the lower edge of the open tube... same texture on the opposite side, same positioning requirement.
There are 16 segments for each of the 80d sides and the texture needs to be a smooth image across all of them.
I have the same need for the top of a sphere.
How do I do that?
Go to styles, edit, and add a checkmark to Display Endpoints.
If you have BreakLines=on the endpoints will appear at all crossed lines. If it is off then only at the end of each line.
WRT two faces that seem to be one (connected at one pont)... I've seen the same thing on numerous occasions. What I did was draw two more lines rather close to the point where the two faces touch thereby creating two small triangles. Delete one of those faces, erase the line for the other, finish by adding a line to close the face you just opened. Everything should be an individual face now.
@slbaumgartner said:
Out of curiosity, did you try showing hidden geometry to see whether that face was split by a non-visible line already?
Yeah, that's how I verified the direction I should use when drawing the line.
As I said before, this wasn't an issue using the FollowMe tool, it was the Upright Extruder. The product of both functions look identical in the middle of the extrusion; FollowMe along an Arc screws up at both ends, the Upright Extruder gets the start correct by has the same flaw at the end. You would not know the faces in the middle were actually quite different in the results of each function until you started texturing.
It's great that most folks understand how to deal with this issue but IMO the failure to handle an arc on its own is still a bug that the SU team should fix.
Using the attribute editor I was able to determine the faces that would not respond to the T shortcut were indeed multiple faces. Drawing a line across the rectangle like this:
and then erasing that line changes the face back to one entity and the shortcut/command is enabled:
The legacy Followme function (which I've used for many years) does not divide the quad and so it is the difference between the two tools that caught me unawares. It appears the only solution is to draw those lines and then erase them (the Cleanup tool does not "see" these as coplanar faces that can be merged). I think I've got better things to do w/ my time than to draw and erase extra lines so it's back to the follow me tool as at least I know what all of it's quirks are and already have procedural fixes inhand.
@dave r said:
Inquiring minds want to know. Was the texture applied to a component or group wrapper or was it on a surface made up of more than one face?
No... all faces are out in the open, so to speak and I'm painting one face at a time.
I did <alt>paint bucket on a left hand face and painted the face immediately to the right. Obviously one came out funky. Painting it again fixed the problem (no second doing of <alt> paintbucket).
It's intermittent, it occurs on any face on these berms I'm making, and it usually corrects on the second painting, tho not always.
In this next view the left hand set of faces are from the original profile shape, the center column of faces was just painted as I described above and the right hand set of columns are unedited, looking as they do after being created by the Vertical Extrusion plugin.
There are no groups or components... everything is a "free" face. The task I'm performing is to copy the texture from the left hand column to the one on the right, make a manual adjustment to account for the fact the shape is curving, and then copy that adjusted texture to faces further to the right (to speed things up I created the shortcut I mentioned several posts ago).
My shortcut T works on the left hand column of faces and a right mouse click displays the Texture... function. The shortcut does not work on the center or right hand columns, nor does the command Texture... appear in the right mouse click menu. And yes, a face is selected when I press T.
Y'all might think it's user error and it might be, but it is totally unclear to me how I might have done something to get into a situation where things work on one face and not another when I've not edited any attributes save what I wrote above.
Containing to paint, just to see what will happen:
Again, all faces are out in the hope, I do <alt> paint bucket on a face the center column and the go paint, paint, paint moving to the right.
Whodda guessed?
@jeff hammond said:
here's the thing.. there is a correct way to do this stuff in a polymodeler and sketchup isn't doing it.. it's doing it the wrong way.. if and/or when the suTeam decides to fix the behavior, are you all going to be complaining about it then?? like- are you going to wish it worked the old way or happy that it works the right way?
That is a very legitimate question to ask... and IMO the correct answer is for the SU Team to leave the existing functionality alone because so many expect it to behave the way it does and so they should simply code up the correct solution and give it another name. I suspect use of the legacy function by itself would decline sharply but the various plug-ins that use it will likely retain their fans for some time... which means the question you ask will move to the plug-in authors to answer.
I'd suggest they do the same thing I just described. Some number of versions down the road the legacy stuff can all die but it would be a mistake to kill them off right away.
@box said:
To put it in simple words that even I can understand....
How condescending. Gee thanks.
I did start off by saying I wasn't sure it was a bug. I'm not sure what was going on... I exited and restarted SU several times and after the 4th restart the function was present again. No idea what was going on.
I have been using SU since Google first acquired it so I'm not a noob.
I will say this: SU 2015 has got some weirdness in it that wasn't present in SU-8 or earlier (I didn't use SU2014). There was that changing the segment count bug for one. I've noticed that doing a <alt> paint bucket to copy a texture more precisely will result in a great deal of weird results when you try to apply that texture elsewhere: sometimes it "paints" the default (no texture); sometimes it "paints" the two tris of a rectangle differently, and sometimes it gets it right. It is utterly unreliable. Can I reproduce it? Not in the exact same sequence with the same weird result but it occurs routinely.
OTOH, using a plugin to copy/paste UV values works perfectly, every time.
I agree w/ Jeff. Thinking of a SU arc as a collection of adjacent triangles sharing a common centerpoint, the problem with the offset tool and arcs is the resulting arc is not mathematically similar to the original arc because relative to that common centerpoint the angles at the start and end of the offset line are not congruent to the same angles on the original. IMO they should be.
@box said:
@genma saotome said:
It is worse in SU because the distortion occurs at both the start and the end.
Worse in SU than in what?
Julis's plug in seems to hold the profile of the extruded face at the start in (IMO) it's correct position -- aligned along the radius of the arc (which is not perpendicular to the path being followed). The SU follow me tool does not do that as you can see in one of replies above.
@unknownuser said:
Here it is at 6.32 deg using a different plugin.
Ahh... that looks right. Which plugin did you use?
p.s. I don't want to give the impression I'm not appreciative of Julia's contributions -- I regularly use four other plugins she's done and I like them very, very much -- it's just I had high hopes for this one in particular.
I don't know if this is a bug or not but it is pretty strange: A couple of days ago I added a few Shortcuts and also remapped the letter T from it's assigned function to "Edit\Item\Texture Position".
Today, pressing the letter T had no effect and so out of curiosity I went into the shortcuts and discovered there isn't a line for "Edit\Item\Texture Position" anymore but if I try to assign the letter T to another Function it asks if I want to take that away from "Edit\Item\Texture Position":
Selecting a face and doing a right mouse click should show the "Texture..." function, but it's not there either.
So where has "Edit\Item\Texture Position" gone and why doesn't the T key execute it?
And here I was hoping this plug in would avoid all of that.
This is the same problem the offset tool has, right: the length of an offset arc is never correct... too long when you create an arc of a shorter radius, too short when you go the other way.
So I do understand what's going on... and I do think there is a general problem because it is altering the original profile (as does the followme tool). I'm creating curved berms -- just the curve, many different models for many different radii, all in 1, 2, 5, 10, and 20 degrees of length. Many hundreds of them. Put yourself in my shoes: Does it really make sense that one must draw tangents on both ends of the arc, reposition the profile face, extrude, and then delete the portions of the extrusions that are on those tangents?
Eneroth's plug in does hold the profile correctly at the start (better than SU Follow Me)... which is why I thought it was going to be useful for me... it's over at the other end that's a disappointment.
@slbaumgartner said:
If this issue is specific to that extruder, have you PM'd eneroth about it? The extension author should have a much clearer understanding of how it works than the rest of us!
It is worse in SU because the distortion occurs at both the start and the end. I've also PM'd the author.
I have attached an example file.
I'm posting here so I can attach an image....
Extruding a vertical face along an arc does not leave the final, extruded face parallel to the radius of the arc itself -- the corner closest to the centerpoint extends beyond where it should and the corner furthest from the center fails to extrude as far as it should.
The specifics are to extrude a vertical face 12.5m long along an arc having a radius of 266.6557m that spans a distance of 6.32 degrees. The arc is altered to have 4 sections.
Highlight all four sections and the vertical face, execute Upright Extrude.
@tig said:
BUT if the intersection with a Line results in an Arc that is effectively swept through 360º - so that its start vertex is at the same point as its end vertex... then later on you will get a BugSplat when trying to change the segments in Entity Info
That's exactly what I was doing (a line from 0,0,0 out some distance equal to the desired radius following by moving to that point to start the circle, finishing it at 0,0,0 again). Only then, huh? Wow... that's an odd one.
To splat or not to splat, that is the question...
The answer seems to depend on the size of the circle. I can start SU, draw a small circle, select the outside edge and change the number of increments from 24 to 360 and it works.
OTOH, start SU, draw circle of 702.1495m (yes, that is what I need to do), select the outside edge and change the number of increments from 24 to 360 and splat.
You folks surprise me... there are several very popular Railroad simulators available these days (AFAIK all for the PC) and all of them enjoy large numbers of people doing 3d CAD models.
There is one Simulator in particular where Sketchup models are very common: MSTS/Open Rails. MSTS was a 2001 product from Microsoft; Open Rails is an Open Source replacement that reads all of the MSTS file formats but uses current hardware/software. I operate in this market as both a content producer and a forum host (http://www.elvastower.com -- guests can view almost everything w/o having to register).
Here's are a couple of examples of my own Sketchup models in one of these sims: http://imageshack.com/a/img607/1407/65ry.jpg , http://imageshack.com/a/img31/1582/p2ii.jpg , http://imageshack.com/a/img841/8291/op1s.jpg .
Sketchup does not do animation and so other CAD tools come into play, such as here: http://imageshack.com/a/img845/7695/xgss.png
As you can see from the images, Rail sims are also world sims; My own projects represent a portion of Downtown Chicago ca. 1950 and a 120 mile span between Oakland and Sacramento CA, also .ca 1950. Some folks, like myself, go for the whole picture... others just do models... most of us also run the simulators.
Railroad simulators are a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of physical model railroading as a whole lot of content is free.
If anyone is interesting in finding out more, drop me a PM and I'll try and answer your questions.
