This week’s SketchUp Plugin of the Week (Flowify) allows you to bend shapes along quads.
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When working in SketchUp, you’ll always find yourself in a situation where you need to be able to bend items a certain way to achieve the geometry you’re looking for. This week’s extension allows you to bend an object along a quad surface.
Plugin Name: Flowify
Plugin Developer: Anders L
How Much does it cost? Free!
Where do you get it?
You can get it by searching for flowify in the SketchUp extension warehouse.
Tool Functions
Basically, what this extension does is takes groups and components and bends them along any face.
This can be useful for any number of things, including creating custom stair rails, creating organic meshes, or just generally detailing shapes you’d otherwise struggle to create in SketchUp.
Using the extension is a 5 step process –
1. Create a target face as a group
2. Create a shape to act as a projection grid as a group.
3. Create two lines connecting your target shape to your projection grid as a group
4. Put those three groups in a group
5. Model the object you’d like to create on your projection grid as a group.
Once you’ve done these things, you can select your group of 3 objects and your object to modify, then select Flowify from the flowify menu.
I think I’m going to do away with the numerical rating system. It feels a little arbitrary and doesn’t feel 100% fair giving numerical scores to extensions that aren’t necessarily comparable. However, I do still want to talk a bit about the following sections.
Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think about this.
Usefulness/Functionality
This extension is great for creating complex shapes in SketchUp. However, it does take some lateral thinking to use sometimes, so it’s not always the right choice. When it is though, it can allow you to do things that would otherwise be very valuable.
Value
This is a free extension. Download and mess around with it to see what you can do!
Ease of Use/Documentation
There are several tutorial videos on the extension page in the Extension warehouse. However, I found them a little long and hard to follow, and struggled for a bit to figure out how this extension worked. I’m not sure if that’s an issue with me or with the instruction, but I found it a little non-intuitive.
Overall
This isn’t an extension you’re just going to use in your everyday modeling. However, it can become another tool in your toolbox for creating items you otherwise couldn’t in SketchUp. Like most extensions, if you learn how to use it, you’ll probably start seeing applications for it almost immediately.
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