Yep! I totally agree. I wish that the new versions of sketchup would not always default to the newest version to save. This is really why. This constantly causes me trouble when I go to use a computer connected to a CNC cutter I have access to. Have to remember to save as ver 2015 or it just doesn't work. And I suspect it's forced obsolescence, not a mandate that the versions be incompatible. Aaargh!

Oh and Pilou, that 6 is exactly the kind of thing I'm working from! That much I have, it's when the center of the bottom loop of the 6 becomes a closed cone that I get my problems.

Hello and thank you for both of your suggestions.

Tig, I have retried with a confirmed perpendicular face and a bit of a starter rail too. In this case it seems as though it didn't do the trick. And thanks for the suggestion of the Upright Extruder plugin by Eneroth. It definitely seems to have treated the process differently, but unfortunately perhaps produced even more internal geometry to clean up. If you had other recommended plugins to try I'd be interested to give them a go - I don't see any obvious ones in the plugin store.

slbaumgartner, you got it right on. The thing is that if I could just click "intersect geometry" and erase a bunch of interior lines/faces I would do it and be fine. The micro lines are the killer here though - they take forever to find and they are quite insidious - on both inside and outside of the form. I did start at 10" but have run into short lines before and about a week back shifted to 10' scale to try to minimize the scale issues. Still very small holes that literally disappear when I zoom in continue to exist.

I find myself wishing there was some way to select a shell form and then just eliminate all interior geometry from that, but neither I nor Solid Solver or Solid Inspector can really make a closed form here.

I think my next plan is to draw a more simple plug on top of where the inside of the conical space should go and try to use trim to cut this away from a block with the outer form of the letter. But I can only do this as a workaround since this is not time-sensitive, it wouldn't work in a normal circumstance.
As I say, thank you both for your suggestions. I appreciate them and any other ways that you might suggest I approach the problem.

follow me problems.skp

Hello,
Thanks for taking a look at this issue. I had tried to solve this problem with Joint Push Pull previously and posted over there.
I have a project where I need to extrude letter forms from a line - not a real shape or I would use the editable 3d text tool.

So, Im making these letters very thick, thicker than they are tall - say 8' tall letter extruded to 10' deep. This works fine for anything without curves: A, F, X, 4, 7 etc.
And it is possible to make work with letters that have radial curves such as U or R. I got a pretty good S too.

But what is driving me crazy is the non-radial curves in my alphabet. G, C, Q - etc.

I had tried to extrude the bottom of existing letters, but now I have returned to just the rail of the letter with a triangle the proper shape of the cross-section of the letter. Really the problem seems to come from when follow me is applied to a non-radial curve and produces irregular interior geometry. That is, with a radial curve in essence you get a cone with a single vertex. But with a changing curve, wow - it produces a bunch of interior geometry and I can't for the life of me figure out how to fix these.
Does anyone have a suggestion of how to accomplish this or better ways to go about it?

Thanks!

follow me problems.skp

@gilles said:

Hum...

Je pense que le résultat recherché est plutôt ça.

[attachment=1:vs5eal7t]<!-- ia1 -->G2.gif<!-- ia1 -->[/attachment:vs5eal7t]

Hello. Sorry, my last post didn't seem to accept the image.
Gilles, that is excellent! Yes, the thicker version is what I am trying to do. And I see there where you are making two follow me shapes intersect each other. I had hoped to extrude the thinner versions that I already had to the big fat ones rather than remake all of them from rails though. My problem seems to come more from a single one extrusion that intersects itself.

But Fredo, the newer version certainly makes a big improvement. I've attached a comparison on the "O" here. IT seems to work far better, leaving much fewer dense areas to fix. I will see how it works on the more complicated letters as I move forward. My only issue here is that I will need to fill in the edges where faces intersect other faces made by extruding the single letter form. Is there a way using the present form of the plugin to make planar intersections automatically produce edges?

Oh, and I think that you are right on, Piliou! I have a bit of wonky model making to fix!
Thanks!

Hello!
I think I have tried what you are demonstrating. Here I pull up with normal JPP as your gif shows on the top face. I do see that a number of the faces are triangles and others are quads. Do you think this is the problem?
Here's another pic.
It looks to me that the issue is more about the extrusion causing intersecting planes.
When I did it before I used the followme JPP option pulling the flat face on the bottom, but it surely resulted in intersecting planes too.
I wonder what other approach I might take.
Thanks for taking a look!

Hi.
This is a fantastic plugin that has made models possible for me in sketchup that I thought would never work.
That said, I'm posting here because I am having trouble with the follow me pushpull part of this.

I have a project to extrude letters from a line form down to a near cubic form. 8" tall letter in edge form extruded by 10".
Linear letters work great! T, 4, N, etc all are fine. But curves, man, they're a problem.

Looking around I tried to find ways to complete this kind of extrusion, but everything seems to cause messed up internal geometry. And I tried the basic follow me, curviloft, extrude by rails, etc.
The best tool for the job seemed to be the follow me function of this tool. As I say, works great on linear geometry. But due to the non-radial curve of the letter forms O, G, Q, 6 - I'm just driving myself crazy here.

I'm absolutely not sure if there is a better way to do this, or if I am using FollowmePushPull Interactive properly here.
If anyone has any suggestions, or if I should post this elsewhere, please let me know.

Thanks for any help!

sketchup doc

Hi John,
Thanks for giving it a try. I just duplicated what you said and sure enough: Splat. Out of curiosity, are you on windows or a mac and using su14 or 15? And did you try with the two that I made? Can you tell me if outershell works for you with these?
I'm not sure what to do now, it seems like there is something really strange going on with my machine. Trimble sure has gotten a lot of Splat notices from my way lately.

Thanks for looking at the model. I think that you both were right that these were made in an odd way somehow. I found internal faces despite these being solid groups! Is that even possible - shouldn't be, right? And yes they had been constructed of components, but I thought I had exploded them and made them unique before making as group. Very strange to me.

So, I returned to the original 12gon beams that make up the forms and removed everything and reconstructed them entirely from group joined to group into an individual rhombic dodecahedron. Great. Then I was able to use the union tool to join one of these to a copy of itself for a solid group of two of these. Great.
But then I went to make the line of ten! Looks all good but splaat. I can't figure it out.
I've attached a two part unjoined pair of unique groups that causes SU to splat every time for me. What could I be doing wrong?
Thanks for looking.

mesh rhombic array working 12gon no internals_unique groups.skp

Yep, that did the trick! Thanks much.

Hello!
I have been trying to assemble arrays of solid groups or components and running into problems.
I've made a two-unit rhombic volume that I want to join with copies to form a cube of repeated units.
I managed to join the two together with an outer shell, but now trying to form a line of ten of them crashes SU every time I try.

It appears that using these solid groups also results in splats with the other solid tools. I can't figure out why.

If anyone wanted to try it out, I would be interested to find out if you had problems or not.

Here's what it looks like:

Thanks for any advice!
BTW, I am on a year old imac.

mesh rhombic array working 12gon vers14.skp

I was away for a couple of days, sorry for not keeping up. Just to say, I do not have TT_menu installed but do have bezier surface. My problem persists with solid inspector in su14 but not su15.
It's a great plugin, I'm not totally ready to switch everything to Su15 yet, so if there is anything I can try just tell me.
Thanks

Very odd. Yes, I've confirmed all of the above. TT_Lib2 always shows up as disabled even if I try to enable it and then restart. Matter of fact, it is the only one that shows disabled. And solid inspector does show as activated. And finally, in the plugins folder I've got both .rb files and folders for both TT_Lib2 and tt_solid_inspector.
When I go to Tools pull down menu it is not there.
But this is SU2014, not SU2015. It does show up in SU2015.

Thanks for the quick responses! TIG, you are right. I never really use the extension manager, but sure enough TT_Lib2 is deactivated. In fact, I've tried to activate (load) it and restart SU twice now. No dice. Each time it deactivates it, no listing of Solid Inspector in the tools menu. Curiously, when I activate it, it shows up as green text in the list of activated extensions. Oh, thanks for updating Compo Spray by the way!
Dave, yes I have tried the new version of TT Library from the plugin store several times.

Does anyone else not see Solid Inspector listed after installing SU15? I can't seem to find it at all in the pull-down menus anymore. Did it move? I looked for it in SU14 and SU15 and reinstalled from both Sketchucation manager and the extension warehouse along with new library file. I've used it for years and found it near the bottom of the tools pull down menu. Working on Mac with Yosemite.

Thanks Tig!
I had overlooked that as I thought it was redundant to your Pipe Along Path.
It does work quite well, but as you say the joining at the nodes produces some issues. I had hoped to use these for 3d printing, so I do need to find a way to make them Solid.
Maybe I can produce a workaround with solid tools to clean it up some by joining groups or sets of parallel tubes.
Thanks for the help, this gets me much further down the road.

Hello!
I am looking for a way to extrude lines in a mesh. Or extrude along a set of connected vertices that have more than two edges attached.

I understand that the follow me tool has problems with branching paths as does pipe along path by Tig. Or rather neither is designed to do this, I guess. I've also experimented some with the curveiloft plugin by Fredo6, but found that it won't seem to make a network of extruded forms.

While I can see why this is difficult given the nature of geometry and surfaces in sketchup, can anyone explain to me why this is such a challenge? It must be something that would be beneficial to folks other than myself, right?

In most simple terms, why can't one thicken a group of intersecting edges? I would imagine the most basic, standard way people would want to do this would be as a cylinder of varying radius, but I could also see it being useful extruded as a rectilinear box that followed the direction of the axes.

I hope that I am being clear in my question. Maybe it is easy and I'm just missing something.
I've tried to upload an example, but I'm not sure it is working.

Thanks,
magazines

Hello,
I'm an educator who teaches only a little bit of 3d stuff as a side to other digital imaging. We teach on the mac platform and do Sketchup for all intro stuff so I also dip their toes in the water with this. Upper division classes move to CNC or Maya.
So, I last installed the edu version of Vray on Sketchup 8 and we used this for a few years. I still have it on my home computer. Honestly I don't know what #version of Vray this is, but I think it's out of support as it was an AsGVIS product and links just go to ChaosGroup with a plea to buy the new version.
A couple of questions:

1. Does anyone know if that old version of Vray can be switched to a new computer and used with SU2014 (or 2013). Old computer is on the way out, I rarely use Vray myself but this would be of value to me to occasionally look at a quick render.

2. Should I pay the $ (edu is $140, cheap but not nothing) for Vray2 for SU and deal with the dongle? I only use this several times a year but if it really is miles better than the old version I may start doing a few more class days on it. The dongle is a limitation for us because for the labs, our IT dept prefers not to go this way. Can anyone clearly say what the major improvements are of Vray2 on SU? As far as I can tell it comes from the "RT" - is this a new form of the frame buffer and will it work well on 3 or 4 year old lab machines?

3. Is Thea an easier rendering platform for introduction - for quick results? Since rendering is far from the focus of the class, a rendering system that was closer to the easy intro quality of sketchup would be very useful. Plus no dongle for labs or my computer. Also the edu is almost half the cost of Vray, meaning if I got excited about using it in class I could pay for a copy for both my laptop and the home computer with Thea. Is the interface an easy transition for people who have experience with Vray?

Thanks for your consideration of these questions. Obviously rendering is not my main focus, but it is an area that we are interested in still introducing at beginning level. Institutionally, we are encouraged to only update/upgrade software if the developers are providing serious and beneficial new features. More and more, it seems new or yearly versions are produced more for money than progress.
Thanks again in advance for your thoughts!

Thanks! Again.

Hi!
So, I've been working with the new plugin you've made TIG and I find it to be of significant use for my needs. I see that a number of other folks have also downloaded it as well.
I set about to use it and realized quickly a feature that would increase its functionality; at least for the users who are using 3d printing from sketchup.
Is there a way to scale the group/component while also leaving the original?
I realize that this usage overlaps with the standard scale tool and the joint-push-pull plugin of fredo6, but if it's not a very difficult alteration, I would certainly be very appreciative. These don't allow one to specify the volume of the particular form, something that seems to be more and more critical for at least my usage.
Thanks very much again for the original - it works wonderfully.

Wow, thanks so much! Donation made, and my great appreciation as well.

I'm very impressed with the positive outcome on a mostly anonymous board! I didn't expect anything really other than a workaround, and I think I'll be using this frequently. Made my day.