This week, we’re going to check out an extension that’s designed to help us edit and simplify curves and contours in SketchUp.
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This extension is a tool from Fredo6 designed to help you work with curves in different capacities. It contains several tools that help you combine, separate, simplify, and do other things to curves.
First, let’s note that you can actually turn these icons on in the toolbar by opening the first menu option, then clicking on the settings icon, then checking the boxes for “Icons Visible in Toolbar”
Now, let’s go through some of the functions
Make Curves (Weld) – This function operates very similarly to the Weld extension from TIG that we’ve talked about in the past. It basically can take a series of edges (or curves) and make then into a single, uninterrupted edge. This can be useful in multiple different things. It’s particularly useful if you are going to extrude anything having to do with that edge, as you’ll be able to do it with a smooth face. One of the benefits of this particular version is
Explode Curve – This explodes curves into individual edges. It’s very similar to the built-in SketchUp explode curves tool with one difference – it will work on curves inside groups and components.
Cleanup Contours – This tool will look at different contour lines and try to clean them up. Based on the documentation, it does this in two ways. First, it takes a look at lines made up of points that are “Colinear” and will combine these lines into a single group (meaning less segments). Second, it tries to remove small spikes in your edges. This also allows it to reduce the number of edges that SketchUp has to display.
Simplify Contours – This tool basically takes a look at your contours and will basically simplify any segment with an angle under a value that you set. This can be great for removing spikes and extra edges, as well as smoothing complex meshes. Especially helpful if you’re dealing with things like imported topography.
Smooth Contour – While simplify contour focused on removing any spikes or edges at or below a certain angle, smooth contour focuses on smoothing all the edges of your contour into an average smoothed spline. There are two different settings for how this tool works – B-Spline, which creates edges “inside” your original contour, and F-Spline, which creates the edges “outside” your original contour. You can adjust the average angle of the curve as well, which allows you to reduce the number of segments in your curve.
Edge properties allows you to bulk adjust the properties of different edges. This can be useful because it allows you to bulk hide an bulk show geometry.
Finally – convert to guide will allow you to take a curved line and create a guide with a construction point at each vertex.
All in all, this is a great suite of tools for managing and adjusting curves in your SketchUp models.
Disclaimers: all opinions are my own, sponsors are acknowledged. Product Links in the description are typically affiliate links that let you help support the channel at no extra cost.
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