Sketchup Tutorials: If you have one fell free to post it!

[BK613]

A third wayto do a cone is to create your base circle, then from the centerpoint of that circle, create your top circle. so you now have an inner and outer in the same plane. select the top circle's poly, switch to move, toggle on fold (alt on windows) and move the top circle perpendicular to the plane of the circles. Not as straight forward as the cylinder method but it allows more precision on your circle sizes.
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on the topic of the thread, you can use an axis other than x, y, or z for your protractor and rotate tools by clicking and dragging at the start of your tool use (along an edge, for example ).

 

[Sgt_G]

Okay, this is pretty much what I had in mind:

But once I pasted a couple onto the ship, they're bigger than I wanted. I'll have to figure out how to make it smaller and still read as "thruster", or come up with something else that also reads as a thruster.

 

[BorgMan]

Did you make components out of them? Because this is typically an object that you want to have as a component, seeing as you said "a couple". That way, you can Scale them smaller by only opening and editing one Component; the rest will follow. If you select the Scale tool and make the component as a whole smaller, that's the only component that will do so; the rest will stay the same size as they were.

 

[Sgt_G]

I just made it a Group as it was only a test item. I understand the idea behind Components but haven't had a real need for them yet.

So, Components ... if I have ten of an item, click on one and change it, the rest don't change unless I opened the item to edit mode first? Did not know that. Good tip to remember.

 

[BorgMan]

That is correct. On a whole, people have a great fondness for Components and actually not a great need for Groups. For example, when I make my ships, I only make half of them. That half is then made into a Component, meaning I need only to edit one while the other will follow. Hit the 3DWarehouse for my TOS Vengeance and look around a bit. A lot of my tricks I use to keep the filesize down are present there. The navigational lights, for example. The outer casing is a component, while the lights themselves are too. When I wanted to have a white navlight above the shuttlebay, I copied the outer casing and resized so that it could fit there. Then the light was copied, made Unique so that I can edit it without changing the rest, and colored white. For use in Kerkythea, I always denote self-illuminating surface with an _L in SketchUp (White gets edited to White_L, for example).

 

[Soran77]

That is correct. On a whole, people have a great fondness for Components and actually not a great need for Groups. For example, when I make my ships, I only make half of them. That half is then made into a Component, meaning I need only to edit one while the other will follow. Hit the 3DWarehouse for my TOS Vengeance and look around a bit. A lot of my tricks I use to keep the filesize down are present there. The navigational lights, for example. The outer casing is a component, while the lights themselves are too. When I wanted to have a white navlight above the shuttlebay, I copied the outer casing and resized so that it could fit there. Then the light was copied, made Unique so that I can edit it without changing the rest, and colored white. For use in Kerkythea, I always denote self-illuminating surface with an _L in SketchUp (White gets edited to White_L, for example).

This is exactly how my ships are created for the most part, components are a sketchup users best friend!!

 

[Soran77]

Components come in handy for last minute editing as well, sometimes I will create several designs of say a nacelle for example, and it is much easier to change out a component than to edit geometry that is a part of the ship half itself!!

 

[Sgt_G]

Okay, so I have windows that are two different sizes (same height, different width). Can I draw one, make it a Component (so I can copy it five more times), and then copy it as a new Component at the other width (and then copy that one five times, too)??? I'm assuming I can, but do I have to "explode" it before saving the second version?

 

[Soran77]

Okay, so I have windows that are two different sizes (same height, different width). Can I draw one, make it a Component (so I can copy it five more times), and then copy it as a new Component at the other width (and then copy that one five times, too)??? I'm assuming I can, but do I have to "explode" it before saving the second version?

Just copy one component and right click it and select "Make Unique" and it's a new component to edit and copy!

 

[Sgt_G]

The move/fold trick worked better than attempting to scale it. Thanks!

Two more questions:

1) I've started a new project (re-doing an old project) and used the mirror component. It works great! But once I'm done, how do I get rid of the seam down the middle?

2) On the Cutter design, when I put the phasers and drone (missile) launcher on the aft hull, I'm melding a box onto the sidewall of a cylinder. How do I make the lines along the intersections hardened in / visible? Same issue where the forward hull melds into the façade of the aft hull.

And yes, I've been watching YouTube videos and searching Google for these answers before bothering you all here (again) with newbie questions.

 

[BorgMan]

You don't need to get rid of that seam in the middle because it won't show up as soon as you're rendering, but you could always use ctrl + eraser to Soften a line so that it doesn't show up. If you have a saucer or ball though, that seam might be visible because the points where the two halves meet aren't identical. We can fix that though. First, create the circle which will be the base of your saucer and then change the number of sides in the Entity Info window. I almost always use 96 sides: it looks good, but at the same time doesn't require too much processing power. Select your circle, select the Rotate Tool, put it in the Center of your circle (the dark blue marker you'll see when you hover with the tool over the middle) and click on the midpoint just to the left or right from the center line of the circle. Now you can rotate your circle a little bit (~1.9 degrees) so that that mid point will be on your green axis; SketchUp will give you a little bit of help by snapping to this axis and mentioning [On Green Axis]. Because both halves now start with a perpendicular face, the seam won't be noticeable at all; ever. Again, check my Vengeance and zoom in on the seam between the two halves of the saucer to get a better look at what I just described.

If you want to make lines visible, you can select singles and select Unsoften in the left/context click menu, or call up the Soften Edges menu where you can adjust a slider if you've got multiple lines you want to Soften / Unsoften.

 

[Bernard Guignard]

That's the one item about sketchup that I'm not impressed about the lack of a true mirror command. but I'm use to real cadd programs

 

[BorgMan]

Mirroring can be easily done by selecting the object you want to mirror, select the move tool and then holding ctrl while moving. This will create a copy of the object you select without the need for ctrl-c ctrl-v. Now it's just a simple context/right click and selecting [Flip Along >] [(Component's) Red - Green - Blue].

 

[aloha62]

Does anyone know how to turn off auto smoothing after object selection? For instance I can select a whole ship or large items and use scale to alter it's size but upon completion the software decides to smooth the whole model. This wasn't much of an issue before as I could just hid 'undo' but now I have models with 100000+ edges it's starting to crash the programme.

 

[BorgMan]

That sounds like an old install. Which version are you using? I haven't had auto-smooth shenanigans for years now and I'm using 2015...