Drawing tools wrap around the curved surface as you draw, leaving perfectly formed faces that can be acted upon by the author’s Joint Push Pull plug-in. It’s hard to believe this plug-in really works, but it does. In addition you get the new tools Ellipse, Parallelogram, Sector (Pie), Circle (3 Points) and an Offset on Surface tool. The plug-in installs a tool palette with analogues for all of SketchUp’s drawing tools: Line, Arc, Rectangle, Circle and Freehand. How often do you want to use SketchUp’s standard drawing and construction tools on a curved surface? With Fredo6’s Tools on Surface, you can. Creating a component from a group also gives you the chance to mirror-duplicate it and work on one half, effectively giving you symmetrical modelling. The Extrude tool gets around the problem with the Push/Pull tool introducing interstitial faces, which can have unexpected consequences for the shape of the derived surface.
BEZIER SPLINE SKETCHUP PLUGIN PLUS
SubdivideAndSmooth gives you the option to crease edges and vertices so that they remain sharp, plus a Knife tool that will cut through a proxy cage, introducing more control points for finer control. Making an object into a group before subdividing will give you a proxy cage, which you can use to manipulate the underlying surface. SubdivideAndSmooth also handles holes and uncapped solids with aplomb, and is not limited to just triangles and quads. You can set the number of iterations between 1 and 4 to increase the surface’s fidelity. Selecting an object and clicking the Subdivide button in the Tool palette produces a perfectly subdivided object. You can also pre-pick edges to bevel them selectively, although you may need to do a little clean-up with the Eraser tool afterwards.Ĭosting a meagre $22, Dale Martens’ plug-in SubdivideAndSmooth puts true subdivision surface modelling inside SketchUp.
This clever add-on enables you to set the number of edges in the bevel, and uses Bezier curves to draw them, to ensure continuity between the resulting curve and the straight edges of the model. (Generally speaking, a 3x followed by 1x bevel distance will produce an acceptable result.) But if you want a little more control over your modelled output, Fredo6’s Round Edge (by Bezier) is the the plug-in for you. Successively applying SketchyBevel will produce more rounded corners. Simply select the whole object, right-click and select Bevel. Chris Phillips’ SketchyBevel applies bevelling to every edge on an object. Thankfully, there are two plug-ins currently available that make bevelling a breeze.
It is possible to create bevelled edges in SketchUp using the Follow Me tool and a bit of forethought, but it doesn’t always work – for example, where more than three edges converge on a point. The third is Normal Push Pull, which is similar to Joint Push Pull, but creates separate faces, extruded along face normals. The second is Vector Push Pull, which will skew the offset faces along a vector defined by dragging the mouse.
The first is Joint Push Pull, which extrudes along normals, giving a smooth, contiguous, offset face. It actually offers three different methods for pushing or pulling a surface. This is where the Joint Push Pull plug-in from SketchUp user Fredo6 comes into its own. It is possible to achieve the same result by building the surface using Offset and Line, but it’s a time-consuming process that’s prone to error. In this case, SketchUp’s own tool will resolutely refuse to work. Sooner or later, though, you’ll come across a situation where you want to perform a Push/Pull operation on a curved surface. SketchUp is founded on its Push/Pull tool, which enables you to easily extrude planes into volumes.
BEZIER SPLINE SKETCHUP PLUGIN MAC OS X
Since Ruby is a scripting language, they will run equally capably on the Mac OS X or Windows versions of SketchUp (and on both SketchUp and SketchUp Pro). Some of these plug-ins automate tasks that would take a fair bit of planning and desk time, while others add capabilities that would simply not be achievable using the base toolbox.
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