I’ve been trying, to my utter misery, to teach myself Sketchup, and while I have made some progress, I’ve gotten to something that’s stumped me entirely.
Here’s the situation: imagine a series of 2 x 10s, meant to be the framing of a deck. It looks something like this:
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So you see that the right-most 2x10 is at an angle, in other words, not parallel to one of the built-in axes that Sketchup uses.
And here’s the problem: it’s lost its top. Imagine a hollow 2x10, with just the faces, ends, and bottoms, but no top.
So all I ask for in this life, really, is some straightforward method to put a top on it. Everything I’ve tried has just caused cascading problems (which seems to be something of a feature of this application, by the way), without even really addressing the one basic problem.
I hope someone here has a black belt in Sketchup (I’m using the freeware version, if it matters), and can put me right.
I sometimes draw a diagonal across vertices to fill a quadrilateral face. It will fill the two triangles and then you can delete the line segment. I’m under the impression that if you pull on the “back” side of a face, you will sometimes get an “empty” face, if that makes any sense.
I’m no expert and have been struggling trying to do architectural drawings for my remodel. The learning curve is a mother fucker.
Sometimes drawing lines on top of the existing geometry close up the space, similar to what Darry Lict said above, but it will work when components are not in line with the geometry.
You are creating components right? Not just drawing shapes and using them in their raw form. Components have many advantages, not the least of them being sides or tops can’t just disappear. Another advantage is you can set the axis on an individual component.
Anyway, if you want to learn Sketchup, you need to check this guy out. SketchUp
Thanks, all. I did in the end manage to get around the problem by making the constituent bits of the defective 2x10 into a group. For some reason, that let me impose a new “lid” on top of it. Making a component would have probably have had the same effect. It’s a bit hard to do after the fact, though.
Frustrating as all hell, though I’ve somewhat got the hang of it now. I’m at least able to get done what I need to do, without feeling the need for either a bottle in front of me, or a frontal lobotomy. But I will say, it took a toll on me to get to this point.
I don’t use apps like sketchup, but the faces of a polygon are referred to as “normals”. Most real time rendering engines, like OpenGL might cull (read: not render/backface culling) the back-faces of normals (as normals have a front/back orientation, like a piece of paper with no thickness).
So, I’m not sure if this is the case here, but sometimes if manipulating vertices and polygons of your modeling efforts the normals might flip or flop. Maybe grouping the separate meshes re-aligned the normals, or not, but it’s usually the first line of defense when faces suddenly disappear on you when 3D modeling.
Of course the faces could’ve somehow been inadvertently deleted too.
I use it for drawing plans all the time. It’s pretty good, but has a few quirks. One key is to learn what to do in SketchUp and what to do in LayOut. I find it annoying as hell that you can’t do dashed lines in SketchUp, so I do a lot of that in LayOut. I’ve even tried lightening up line colors instead of using dotted lines, but the lighter color doesn’t translate to PDFs when exported from LayOut, so that’s pretty useless.
Otherwise: Layers, layers, layers. And groups and components.
It takes discipline, but if you use a different layer for different parts of the plan (walls, cabinets, windows, etc.) it will make it immensely easier to go back and edit later.
Group things that you might want to edit separately, and make components of things you are using multiple times. I actually group all geometries on the same layer, and that helps a lot, too.
As for the OP, it looks like you got your answer, but I can’t for the life of me decipher your drawing. When you say “rightmost”, what does that mean? Is that dashed line supposed to represent a 2x10? And are you using the term “framing” to mean “decking”
At any rate, if you have a solid that loses one of its sides, just draw a line across the open area. If the open side is all in one plane, it will fill in and you can delete the line.
It’s a plan view of the framing of a deck. That dashed line on the right is indeed supposed to be a 2 x 10 – an inherent problem with trying to represent timber products with ASCII characters.
I’ll take you up on your suggestion about layers. That’s one thing about Sketchup I haven’t learned yet, not even a little bit. But I can see where it would help.