@brookefox said:

You can use drape, but I think if you draw a centerline on the surface itself, you do not need it as it follows the terrain already. And if you drape the road itself it will slope like you were trying to avoid.

Very true... what I did was to draw a centreline on an XY plane, using the contour lines as reference, so that the road generally followed the contours, but also had the right curvature, etc. in plan view then I draped this onto the landform to pickup the elevations. Then picked up the line again, simplified this line to remove excess vertices, dips and bumps before finally doing the follow me and keep road which I then stamped onto the surface.

I'd appreciate any feedback if there's a better way to do this.

Cheers

• Mick
  

road example.skp

OK, I figured it out. I guess this is why it's called the newbie forum! For some reason I thought the follow me and keep tool was doing the cutting into the surface. Now I realise that it is a combination of the sandbox tools "drape" (to find the vertical variation in the road path and "stamp" to cut into the surface (setting an appropriate offset for the batters), it was relatively straight forward. Cheers - Mick

@aceshigh said:

when I get close and rotate around, make the whole screen "shake"

I know this thread is old, but I also get this symptom if I have a dialog box open (e.g. Layers) on the same screen. If I close the box, then I don't get the shakes. I figured it was video card problem, as I wouldn't have this problem on a different computer with the same file. Cheers - Mick

Hi Gaieus,

The actual file is too big, but I snipped a bit off the surface I'm working on. Haven't actually got the real road section or path yet, so I just made one up. Hopefully the file is self explanatory. I just want to create a road along the path, drop it into the topography, adjust the height and add cut/fill batters along the side of the road.

If this file is too much to work with, the actual file I was was referring to in my post was the one you posted earlier in this topic.

thanks for looking at it

• Mick

road example.skp

@gaieus said:

With a little bit of manual work and the Follow me and keep plugin, you can easily create a road whose surface is horizontal sideways and even has a side walk with curb.

Hi Gaieus,

I've got the plugin, read the associated thread and tried it out on the model you posted here, but I just can't seem to replicate your results (with the cut and fill batters). Any chance you could annotate your example with a few tips? I have a relatively simple road that I want to cut down through some terrain.

Thanks

• Mick

I don't think I fully understand the shape you're trying to create, but I had a go at something similar anyway. Maybe this will help? Cheers - Mick

corner.skp

Hi Jean, the example file is overly simplified, but demonstrated my issue, but maybe I over-simplified it. Simply moving the face is possible, but in my situation I had an irregular shape with faces aligned on many different XY angles and I wanted to be able to selectively push-pull them out on the horizontal. As it turned out I needed to use a combination of your technique and smart-push pull to get the shape I wanted. Thanks for your reply - Mick

Actually, I just found out that this http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=40638 will do it.

Cheers

• Mick

Hi guys thanks for the replies.
Giles, I sort of though that cleanup would get rid of that face as 'hidden geometry' but I guess not - the face isn't immediately obvious but makes sense now.
VolJanko - yeah that's the sort of thing I was after... looks like I'd have to buy it to try the features I wan't but might be interesting given the other functions.

Cheers

• Mick

Hi, I was wondering why this doesn't work: I use smart push pull to extend a shape (see attached for simplified example). From what I understand there's no option with this plugin to merge the original and extra geometry, but I thought that the Cleanup3 plugin would easily merge the co-planar faces, but for some reason it doesn't seem to detect the dividing lines. Why? Apart from manually editing, what would be the quickest way to convert this object into a "solid". Thanks in advance - Mick.

smart push pull.skp

@tig said:

THE XYZ axes are the model axes - ignoring any temporary resetting of the axes that you might have done.
Any changing of them cannot be found in the API, as far as I know.
The XY 'angled' slice option could be set to the angle of the XY axes if know ?

Thankyou TIG, that worked (set axis to 'A' and enter the angle in the 2nd dialog box) - just wasn't sure if I was missing something or not. I can't write rubies, but I'm surprised that the API doesn't provide a way to know the group axis settings?

Funny how things work actually, I downloaded your plugin out of curiosity, but almost immediately found a potential application for it - looking at cut and fill cross-sections. I have a idea/suggestion though... what about allowing the user to select a path for which the cross-sections would be aligned? So for my pic below, instead of just following one line, if my shape had a significant bend in it, a central path could be drawn and the cross sections would be aligned along and perpendicular to that path?

In any case thanks for the plugin - nice.

Cheers

• Mick

Hello TIG, thanks for this plugin - you do some fantastic work!

I was just playing around with it an noticed that the slices for x or y axes always seem to be aligned with the original axis orientations, even if the group is aligned differently. So even if I reset the axes with a group, or for the entire model, to get the alignment I'd like - the slices seem to ignore this. Is this right or am I missing something?

thanks

• Mick
  

Gaieus/Bjornkn, I'd forgotten about flip edges. Thanks heaps for your time and patience!

• Mick

OK, it's no big deal since follow-me worked nicely - but..

I'm attracted to the elegance of the autofold option, but it frustrates me that it doesn't seem to work for anything but the most simple shapes. For instance, with my original shape, I get the result shown - where a vertex will be completely missed. With my more complex shape, I was getting lots of "twisting" (long lines between vertices at an angle instead of directly to the paired vertex) as well as missed vertices - even though I constrain the move to the z axis. I've also tried scaling up 100x to see if it's anything to do with small faces - it isn't.

Is this just a SU quirk or is there a trick to make it work nicely?

thanks

• Mick

So simple! I just couldn't get my head in the right space... thanks heaps for the replies guys.

• Mick

Hi folks,

OK - the attached is a simplified version of what I'm trying to do - but I don't want to have to join faces/delete edges manually. In essence, I want to get a flat shape, push-pull it to give it volume then offset the top edge by a set distance, then join the top and bottom faces, so that each side face has the same slope. Obviously with a small shape it works OK to do it manually. But is there a way to do it for a large/complex shape?

Scaling the top face around the centre doesn't work as the faces end up with different slopes.

Any suggestions?

thanks in advance

• Mick
  

slopeblock.skp

My first thought was to do it as a solid. Took about 10 mins with a bit of annotation, but I reckon this was about the same as it would take me with beam components. Uses SU Pro solid tools, but it could be done similarly with some plugins? Cheers - Mick

structure.skp

OK, I've got my mesh. The original cad contours had 1.3 million edges.

Thanks guys for your suggestions... like I said - it's been a great learning experience.

TIG - I experimented more with the simply contour plugin - most of the problem were with my contour set - some were ludicrously convoluted whereas most were quite simple. There was no one setting that did a good job with all of them, but with some selective processing of different sets of contours based on complexity, it worked well.

Ogan - I tried tgi3d amorph. Haven't had time to explore it all properly (hardly at all actually - there seems a lot too it), but I ran through your suggested method. I had a similar experience here to that described above. Setting a 20m segment length worked for some of the contours, whereas other lengths were required to get anything acceptable for other segments. In other words I had to do a lot of selective processing using different settings to get a good overall result.

In the end I used "Edge Tools" to simplify all the curves to within 2m of the original, then went and cleaned up the overlapping contours with reference to the original dwg. At the same time I deleted any extraneous noise. This all took about 1hr, but wasn't too onerous. Then I just used the sandbox tools to create a mesh from contours. The result is shown in the attached. This was definitely the quickest way to process the entire contour set in 1 go and came up with an acceptable result. I think my method posted at the beginning of this thread gave a really nice result, but was too labour intensive for anyone dealing with a lot of lines, but otherwise I'd recommend it.

thanks again for your help with this...

Regards

• Mick

@tig said:

The Sandbox tools 'From Contours' has an optional complementary Google Ruby-script called 'Simplify Contours' to reduce the complexity before using the main tool.
Have you tried that ?
http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/download/rubyscripts.html [download link at bottom of the page...]

Hi TIG, thanks for that - yes, I had tried that one. It did work sort of OK, but I was getting a pretty messy mesh even with very over simplified contours, so abandoned it in favour of my more labour intensive method. I was also getting little ledges in the surface along each of the original contours - it made some of the valleys look like open cut mine pits. I like your thinking though - the simple solutions are often the best. Regards - Mick

Thanks for your reply Ogan. I'll have a detailed look at this tomorrow and see how it works and will report back. Regards - Mick