Sketchup lacks a chamfer tool. However, with some patience chamfering can be done manually. First of all your curved edge needs to be exploded. Explode curve Next you offset the surface with the desired chamfer radius and tidy up any extra lines by healing them and removing extras. Offset the curve by your chamfer radius Push/pull the inner section by the same value to create a step up. If this doesn't work, you need to redraw over the new curved lines closest to the edge. These were created by the offset and aren't intersecting lines yet. Redrawing the end lines heals the surface. Push/pull Create an arc at the end of your chamfer. I prefer to use a half-circle (height is twice the height of your chamfer radius and Sketchup locks at half-circle automatically. Using a half circle reduces the number of faces used. Drawing a half circle Divide the half circle Click the centre of the arc to divide in two and remove the lower section. Once again, explode the curve by right clicking it and selecting explode curve. Explode curve Using the rotate tool with the exploded curve still selected, hold CTRL and from the very midpoint of your top surface (which is a half circle in this case) click and rotate your new arc. The first rotation point will be its topmost endpoint and the second rotation point will be the next point along the surface you are using to create a chamfer. Clone the arc with the rotate tool by holding CTRL. Fill in the faces between each of these arcs with the line tool. Redrawing the arc's individual sections may be necessary. Creating the faces Now the chamfer is taking shape, all we need to do now is clone the entire section all the way around the curve. This is done in the same way as before, but by selecting both the arcs and all the faces inbetween. Clone the curved section with the rotate tool again and by holding CTRL. Two sections done Once the section is duplicated once, type the number of curved sections you need followed by an "x" to duplicate it several times around your pivot point. In this case we need 11 on top of the first one. You can retype the value again if you need more or less sections. More duplication (11x) Select your chamfer and right click one of the lines. Select soften/smooth edges. Move the slider from the left hand side along until your lines disappear. Finished chamfer Some lines may need softened one by one. Right click these and press soften. Others may be extra lines that are no longer needed. Delete these. If some faces disappear, just use undo and try softening the line again.
nice guide , got anything on making matrices of items (i.e. duplicating one item to a grid of 4 x 4 of them...)? edit: did you have any pics of the smoothed chamfer?
This is my only guide. I may write more in future, but as you may notice this is a guide not covered by the basic sketchup tutorials. It uses several tools and sketchup methods to make a new method which could really be done much simplier with a tool within sketchup. These are the kind of guides I plan to write for much more advanced "sketchup-ing".
Ouija >> damn... sketchup must be one of the worst cadprogram i´ve seen... that sort of thing is soo easy in SolidWorks...
raxxo>> it's not a CAD program, it's intended only to sketch ideas and concepts. it's very very good at that, but lacks a few features, but then, it is only 16mb, is very easy to learn, etc etc. so i don't think it's fair to compare it to CAD programs.
Raxxo, please take the time to download the demo and try it out for yourself. View some of the tutorial videos and you'll see how innovative it is. It is so simple to modify 3D designs in realtime, adding/removing/editing components, textures, opacity, shadows etc. It is truely a superb program and the company's name "@Last Software" is pretty appropriate.
I´d rather use SolidWorks... its more advanced and i like it =) tried sketchup but it didnt appeal to me the same way Solid does...
for a program thats only like 20 megs installed sketchup is FANTASTIC imo super easy to use even easier to learn only like 20 megs installed and its super easy to use ( this gets mentioned twice simply because its that easy to use ) i agree that modelling very detailed things is a pain compared to other programs like solidworks, but it was made for the quick and easy presentation of architectural plans, not really technically correct mechanical parts If i had solidworks im sure i wouldnt go back to sketchup when it comes to mechanical stuff, but alas
I thought I'd try a red blood cell to try out your guide. (second pic uses translucent texture) As you can see, I haven't got it quite right - the smoothing hasn't worked on the radial lines (my fault), but the effect is still good...
I need som help in sketch up. My English is not so good, so I hope you understand what I mean. Here is my problem I cant get som areas filled with colors, you se what i mean on the picture I want everything to be black.. Sombodey who knows what I have done wrong? It`s not the fan hole, it`s thea area over the optical drives
got a sphere modelled in sketchup using this tutorial....does anyone want it or have space to host it?
Spheres (.zip) if you need them, i didnt make them found them on the the sketchup website. Includes smoothed and normal spheres.
