I'd like to make a sculpture consisting of several hundred sheets of paper with a heart laser-cut from each. The size and the position of the heart changes slightly from one sheet to the next so that, when all the sheets are stacked together, the heart-shaped holes form a heart-shaped tunnel through the several-inch tall stack. The tunnel winds back and forth a couple of times, so you can't see the end.

Each sheet has to be a separate file (pdf e.g.). The two approaches I'm considering for generating these files are programmatic (e.g. using Processing or Python) and graphical. For the latter, I'm thinking of using SketchUp to create the heart and then use Follow Me to extrude it along a curvy path. Then I'd embed the resulting tube within a rectangular solid (representing the stack of paper) and use boolean operations to create the corresponding void within the solid. Finally, I'd slice up the solid and save each slice as a separate file. I have some questions about this approach:

1. Follow Me is going to want to keep the heart perpendicular to the path at each point along it. This may work but I'd like the option of keeping all the hearts parallel to each other. Is there a way to get Follow Me (or some other tool or plug-in) to do this?

2. Can anyone recommend a particular slicing tool that can produce hundreds of .05" thick slices easily, and save each as a separate file (ideally, .pdf or .ai)?

3. I need to be able to set the line width of the holes left by the heart cutouts to <.005" for the laser to recognize them as cutting paths. Is there a way to do this within SketchUp? I might be able to automate this step within Illustrator.

If anyone has ideas for a better approach, please let me know. Thanks for your help.

I guess MoI's the winner then. Thanks.

Thanks, Frenchy. Have you used Artisan with SketchUp? If so, how would you compare that combination to MoI?

I have some projects coming up that are going to require curvier, more organic models than I've had to do in the past with SketchUp. They are going to be 3D printed. I'm fairly competent with SketchUp (though I'm still on v8) but haven't used Artisan. If I adopted a completely new tool for this work it would be MoI. I'm wondering if anyone out there has experience with both SketchUp + Artisan and MoI and can weigh in with their impressions of each approach. I'm not concerned about the cost, and only slightly concerned about MoI's learning curve, which is supposed to be fairly gradual (should I be more concerned?). Thanks for your help.

Got it. Thanks!

Here you go. The problem appears related to whether or not the background on which the square is drawn is a group. If it is, I have the problem. If it isn't a group, I don't.

If I apply a color or texture to a 2D object like a square, the color/texture is only visible from certain directions within the model. I have to add some depth to the object (make it 3D), even if it's only a tiny amount (e.g. .01"), to make it consistenly visible. Is there a way to achieve this result while keeping the object strictly 2D? Thanks.

I selected the inside edges shown in blue and ran Follow Me. No hole.

Yup, that did it. Thanks.

It's about 2.5" square. I'm not at my PC at the moment. I'll try your suggestion tomorrow. Thanks.

I'm trying to create a square cap with a quarter-round edge to insert into the end of a square tube. I start with the upper image (below, Cap1.jpg), select the entire perimeter edge. and then click on the quarter-round profile with the Follow Me tool. The result is the lower image (below, Cap2.jpg). It's perfect except for the triangular hole at the top of the lower corner. How can I prevent this? Thanks.

I'm using SketchUp Pro v8.0.16846 on Win7 x64.

Never mind. I had a bunch of layers turned off and the geometry was hiding in there. Brain fart. Sorry for the waste of electrons.

Well, my stats don't show any components. If I purge unused materials I save a couple MB. If I then purge all unused I save another 13MB, but I'm still at around 6MB, and I don't know what was purged. Stats show I still have 112K edges and 10K faces, even after I turn on hidden geometry (which reveals a single line) and delete everything.

While tracking down another problem with a model I selectively deleted geometry to reduce my file size, which started at about 23MB. I ultimately got to the point where I'd deleted everything (<CTL> a <DEL>), and the file was still 21MB. I thought maybe the textures I'd imported from photos were causing the bloat, but they total only about 4MB on disk. What else could be causing this? Thanks.

Thanks, pbacot. That did the trick.

In the attached files you can see that the stone tile I've made extends beyond the edge of the wall (because I've tiled the tile quasi-randomly, giving the field a ragged edge, requiring the tiles to extend beyond the wall edge to get complete coverage). How can I cut off this excess? I've played around with some of the solid tools, but the tile, apparently, isn't a solid. Thanks.

That's it. Thanks.

I'm modeling my backyard based on plans provided by a designer. I've gotten a plan for some retaining walls from one of the subs and want to import and scale it to the dimensions of the rest of the model, to see where the walls will go. I've done this before and I can import the plan fine (it's a jpg), but I can't remember the technique for resizing it to the model. Something about drawing a line on the plan's scale and then setting its length to that of the scale, but that's not it, and I can't find any discussions on this (must not be using the right search terms). I know I can iteratively resize the plan, but the approach I'm thinking of does it in one operation. Thanks for your help.

Cool. That did it. Thanks.

In the attached file, I've created some short, square supports on layer Support 3. I've copied two of these and placed them on layer Support 5. When I toggle Support 5 visibility, the two copies (and nothing else) turn on and off as they should. When I toggle Support 3 visibility, however, all the originals on Support 3 turn on and off (as they should), but so do the two copies on Support 5, as if they're on layer Support 3 and Support 5. How do I fix this so the copies I put on Support 5 only toggle with that layer? Thanks.

Sketch.skp

On the other hand, TIG, what's the difference between creating some geometry on Layer 0 and later assigning it to Layer X, and just creating it on Layer X to begin with? If all your geometry ends up on different layers, some of which are visible and some of which aren't, how is this approach going to avoid the problem I'm having? I can see how ensuring everything is grouped appropriately makes a difference, but that's a separate issue.