Sketchup

[Chris333]

James was talking about picasa scanning through all the files and photos, that is the picasa program. You don't need it.

[Chris333]

Blast from the past 

I've been using "Sketchup make" the last few days to make some parts. It is a little bit chunky, but I finally got it to work for me.

One thing. I can't draw a radius smaller than .018". Anyone here know of a fix or plug-in that will fix that?

This is my first 3D drawing:


You can see the rounded edges on the cylinder caps. They are extruded from a CAD drawing. When I try to round off the other edges it says too small a radius.

[wcfn100]

I think the trick is to draw at 2x and scale it by 50% when your done.

Jason

[peteski]

...or even in 1:1 scale then reduce it to 0.00625%
I haven't used SketchUp for few years now but I recall that some surfaces it creates were inside-out.  I think that CADSpan makes a plugin which will show and correct the wrong facing surfaces.  There might be much more plugins nowadays to get the drawing ready for 3D printing - like I said, I haven't messed around with it for a while.

[Chris333]

Yes I now know that surfaces are inside out in the photo I posted. I have fixed it since then. Been using this method to fix them:
http://3daddfab.com/blog/index.php?/archives/10-Automatically-Repair-STL-Files-in-2-Minutes-with-netfabb.html

Now I know you can just select a surface and flip it.    Hey it is my first drawing.

Does the scaling trick also work for polygons?  Those cylinders are 24 polys and when I change them to 96 it says circle too small.

[peteski]

Yes I now know that surfaces are inside out in the photo I posted. I have fixed it since then. Been using this method to fix them:
http://3daddfab.com/blog/index.php?/archives/10-Automatically-Repair-STL-Files-in-2-Minutes-with-netfabb.html

Now I know you can just select a surface and flip it.    Hey it is my first drawing.

Does the scaling trick also work for polygons?  Those cylinders are 24 polys and when I change them to 96 it says circle too small.

I just wanted to mention the surfaces thing... 
I think drawing in a larger scale, then reducing to the proper scale will solve most your problems.  But there might be a SketchUp limit on just how finely you can render a cylinder (at any size). Easy way to check: draw a much larger cylinder and see how it behaves.

Hey, I'm no SketchUp expert either. The only really useful thing I designed was a church steeple roof for one of Spookshow's scratchbuilt models. 

[engineshop]

I am using Sketchup for two years. I draw everything ten times bigger. It is just easier for me to calculate, since I use metrics.