Oh, wow... thanks Thomthom that plugin works fantastically well!!
This forum is great. You all people rock! Thanks a lot!
Oh, wow... thanks Thomthom that plugin works fantastically well!!
This forum is great. You all people rock! Thanks a lot!
At last! thanks a lot Chris... so now i know how to "fix" a single curved solid.
Still I would like to know if there's some way to do this for several solids at one time. Because if I select diferent cones -or diferent solids in general- then I can't "edit" them as a "group" and do the that routine just one time.
In the end, I suppose there's no way that SU can do that automatically as I shown with the AutoCAD options menu, right? It would be nice if in future updates they could implement that feature. For bigger models with dozens of curved solids it will take days to "fix" each cone, cylinder, etc., manually.
Mitcorb,
thanks, now it works (I didn't use the Edit group prior to the eraser-crtl...)
Thanks everyone for your help.
great, thanks Chris...
meanwhile here's another example... I don't see how with the profiles ON I could solve my problem...
these are actually cones, also done with AutoCAD... their silhouettes, now with hidden geometry OFF and profiles ON in the View menu, does not show..
then I turn hidden geometry on still with the profiles on (so now there's nothing hidden).. now I see the silhouettes but I don't want the "auxiliary" lines (the dotted lines)
so i select one of the cones and click on soften/smooth edges
the box starts with the slide at 0 degrees (so the lines are dotted)
and I move the slide to the 180 degrees (and now the lines are dashed including the base of the cone which I want to keep as a continous line)
since this does not do what I want, i edit the group of that cone and open the group... I select some of the lines and click on entity info.. i unhide them (that I don't understand: how it is they were "Hidden" if i have the Hidden geometry ON in the view menu?)
so now i close the group and back to the view menu, i uncheck the hidden geometry and those six lines appear...
... but those are not the silhouettes for that view, so i move the camera until one of them "become" one of the silhouettes of the cone...
So, what I'm missing? I can't do that for every single curved solid in the model and for any new point of view!
Chris, if you really can do a small tutorial for this particular problem I would be very grateful,
thanks
Well, first thanks for all your replies,
Thomthom,
your method works ok, but ... do I have to edit each group, then select each line in that group and then in the entity info box of each line select all the lines that I want to hide for each particular view? .. because if I want a different view and I rotate my point of view then it won't be those edges that I've edited the ones that will define the "silhouette" of the rounded corner and I'll have to start again.
So my question is if there's some way that Sketchup can automatically "detect" what the are the silhouettes for each view and then show up only the boundaries just like AutoCAD do? .. if you have a curved solid in AutoCAD, like a cylinder, you can tell it to show x lines per surface (which would be those dashed and dotted lines in SketchUp) or simply to show the siolhouettes per solid and surface independently of what is your XYZ position and from where you're looking at the solid...
these captions show the AutoCAD method: first one without the silhouettes and 4 "contour lines per surface", the one with 20 (that actually don't show the silhouette), and then one with only the silhouette and 0 lines "inside" the geometry of the solid --- that's what I was asking if it's possible to do with SketchUp, because it would do the most basic hidden line rendering that I'm looking for (and that AutoCAD, as far as I know, can't do... in fact, if someone knows if AutoCAD can do that type of renderings tell me how...)
Anyway, what AutoCAD won't do will be to "emulate" a hand rendering WITH silhouettes and that's why I turned to SketchUp... but if for every view i have to personally edit each curved solid and define its boundaries by hand it will take me hours with a medium/large model.
Chris, Mitcorb,
thanks for you suggestions but I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong: if i select a whole group and use the eraser with crtl or shift it just don't do anything, and if i select a group, edit it, and then select line by line with eraser + crtl it just don't do nothing either... of course without the crtl pressed it delets the whole group.
And still I don't quite understand the difference between a dashed line and a dotted line... but I just want them to disappear not to be smoothed/softed (it seems that check or uncheck the smooth/soft only turns dotted lines into dashed lines?)
Sorry if I seem a bit dumb but it's my first time with SU... and, this silhouettes problem aside, it's really a fast, flexible and great piece of software!
Thanks again.
Ok, this is the SU model (.skp).
If you need it I could try to upload the original .dwg file as well.
Thanks again.
thomthom,
no, they aren't... in fact, i've tried all the combinations: hidden geometry on w/ soft/smooth and w/o soft/smooth (and apparently it doesn't seem to do anything if i move the slide in the soft/smooth box), and hidden geometry off w/ and w/o soft/smooth (then i see the changes i showed above: i lose all the inner lines except the outline and still the rounded corner is inivisible..)
Chris,
I'm not sure if I'm doing this right but when you mean to unhide you mean to leave the Hidden Geometry option unchecked in the View menu right? I already have that (and to be sure that i had not any hidden line somewhere i also clikcked in Unhide > All under the Edit menu)... so all my lines are shown and then i click in the small building with the rounded corners, select it, then right-click and I open the soft/smooth edges option, the menu appears and the slide is in the 0,0 degrees with the smooth normals checked and the soften coplanar unchecked... if i move it to 180 degrees -or if i check/uncheck the normals and coplanars, or if i do a combination with all these options- the building not only NOT shows the corner but almost dissappears..
by the way, this happens as well with the edge of the roof of the gas station: if i move the slide to 180degrees almost all the lines disappear... and what happens with the circular columns supporting the roof is that, since this is a solid with no straight lines, either with the slide to 0 or to 180 remains invisible, it only shows the circle in the base of the columns.
I guess there's something wrong the curved solids... not that they look polygonal (cause if i show the hidden geometry then they look perfectly curved but with all these dashed lines that appear in the first pic i posted) as some other threads of the forum talked about.
If it helps: I did the model in AutoCAD 2007 and saved it in that version, then imported to SU as a .dwg... I also can do a screen capture of every step i do if you think you could help me better...
Thanks a lot again for your patience.
pmolson, Chris, thanks for your answers ... but it doesn't work..
this is what happens with the profiles set to "4":
and this is what happens if I move the slide to 180 degrees in the soften/smooth edges box (in fact, as i move the slide to the right, the silhouette progressively loses almost all the "inner" lines leaving the outline EXCEPT the one that defines the limit of the curved corner):
since I'm new with SU I don't even know if what I'm asking for is possible or not... but it's really strange that I can't do what apparently would be the most simple rendering.
Maybe it has to do with AutoCAD and how it saves .dwg files? is AutoCAD "really" compatible with SU (or "fully" compatible)?
Thanks again.
Hi, I'm new here, first post and hello to everyone.
I've searched for this question in the forums but I haven't found any solutions (maybe I should have searched better but anyway...).
I'm also new with Sketchup and maybe this is too easy to solve but i can't figure it out... I've done a model with AutoCAD, imported to SU and i'm trying to do a hidden line rendering. Problem is that the silhouettes of the curved solids don't show up unless i put the hidden geometry on. But even then it's not a continous line but a dashed one and I don't want all these extra lines that appear when I put the Hidden Geometry on -if i delete them some faces dissappear-.
So my question is, is there a way to do a rendering with the Hidden Geometry off but the silhouettes of the cylinders on (the red line in these images)?
hidden geometry on: Too many lines, don't like the black areas
hidden geometry off: silhouettes not showing
can i do this? HG off and silhouettes:
Thanks a lot in advance (and pardon my English)!