Round Corner For Sketchup

SketchUp tries desperately to keep the FollowMe profile perpendicular to the path. When it turns a tight corner, the profile actually protrudes further than the center point of the path arc. There are a couple of other resulting oddities that can be seen if you zoom in close and turn on Hidden Geometry.

RoundCorner performs the rounding of the edges and corners of 3D shapes along a 2D profile, in 3 modes: Round corners, Sharp corners and Bevel. RoundCorner also supports concave corners (always rendered as Round) and non-orthogonal edge faces. Corners can have 2, 3, or more edges.

Rectangles are simple shapes, but for those of you who like pizzaz in your rectangles, LayOut has four rectangle tools. Each tool does a little something different with the rectangles lines or corners, as shown in the following figure:

Roundcorner is an extension from Fredo6 for SketchUp designed to help you add rounded edges and bevels to your SketchUp models. It allows you to both round off and bevel your corners, and is great for creating rounded edges and chamfers in your models!

This tool is designed specifically to create rounded corners and edges. It will basically take your edge and round it off to a curve. This particular tool will take the corners and round them off, and you can also set the number of segments created in each curve that makes up your rounding.

Instead of creating round edges, Bevel allows you to add a simple bevel to your edges. This is an excellent tool to add a quick bevel or chamfer without creating a whole lot of geometry that will slow down your SketchUp model.

SketchUp has a downloadable version called SketchUp Make, which you can get at www.sketchup.com. But they also have a web-based version which works right in your Internet browser. This version is called my.sketchup, and to use it just go to www.my.sketchup.com.

RoundCorner[/color] makes the edges and corners of 3D shapes round along a 2D profile, in 3 different modes like Round corners, Sharp corners and Bevel. RoundCorner is compatible with concave corners (always rendered as Round) and non-orthogonal edge faces. There are 2, 3, or more edges in Corners.

When you drag a corner, you can also control other corners of the same size with the same action. This way, you can control pairs of corners at the same time or single out a corner and edit the other three.

If you use the top face as the Follow Me path, the Follow Me face is extruded around the top of the box, removing volume (Figure 4-2). This example is simple because it was clear where to draw the Follow Me face.

One method is to draw the basic rectangle in Top view, and draw arcs in each corner. When the arc preview is magenta, you know it is equidistant from the corner along both edges. Trim the corners to make a rounded rectangle and then pull it up.

Select the Follow Me path. To do so, you could click each individual edge, but an easier way is to double-click the top face and then Shift-click to unselect the top face plus all four edges that compose the notch. Then use Follow Me to extrude the face around the remaining selected edges (Figure 4-6).

Erase all new faces except for one vertical face on the inside and one vertical face on the outside. Draw a small half-circle face on the outside vertical face (shown in Figure 4-11 in yellow) and a tall arc (shown in orange) on the inside vertical face. The orange face will be used to create the lid, and the yellow face will be used to create the lip around the bottom of the lid. Trim the rest of the temporary vertical faces. If you paint your new faces, be sure to paint both the front and back face, to ensure that the colors will show even if the Follow Me operation reverses the faces.

Start with a model of a table top. Along one edge, add a rounding face (shown in Figure 4-14 in yellow) that will be pulled around the table top. You can create your model from scratch, or download my Table Top model from the 3D Warehouse.

This example uses the same Follow Me technique to make rounded corners. To prevent the rounded corner objects from breaking the rest of the table, you will use the grouping technique within Follow Me, which is described in Recipe 2.3.

It you were to make a round object for the corner now, using the technique from Example 1: Rectangular Table, the top face of the table would be broken by the top face of the Follow Me object. To protect the existing faces of the table, you need to use a group.

Activate Select and double-click one of the vertical end faces of the pulled rounding faces. This selects both the face and its surrounding edges. Right-click on the face and choose Make Group. The face will then appear with bold edges and surrounded by a bounding box (Figure 4-26).

The next step is to draw the Follow Me circle, and it is important that the circle have the correct number of sides. Because this model is based on a hexagon, the number of circle sides should be divisible by six. This ensures that the segments of the circle, and therefore the segments of the resulting round corner, will align with the edges of the Push/Pull faces. Activate Circle and make sure the number of sides is a multiple of six (24 is a good number). As you did for the rectangular table, place the center directly above the corner of the table (Figure 4-27). Do not click yet to complete the circle.

To establish the radius of the circle, click on any point along the top edge of the group. This ensures that a circle segment will start just above the group, so the round Follow Me object will align perfectly with the Push/Pull objects (Figure 4-28).

Another way to create the same table involves offsetting the table top, rounding the sharp corners of this new offset face, and using Follow Me to extrude the rounding face along the new edges. You can download my Hexagon Table Alternative model from the 3D Warehouse, which contains scenes that show the steps for this method.

Because the box corners are to be rounded evenly, the rounding must be based on a sphere whose extents meet the box corners. So draw a horizontal circle, perpendicular to and concentric with the large circle. The number of sides should be a multiple of four, because the circle has to align with the four corners of the box. To establish the radius, click on a corner of the box above the circle (Figure 4-35).

Move the sphere straight down so that the lowest point on any of the protruding sides meets the midpoint of a lower edge (Figure 4-38). This establishes the corners of the box that need to be trimmed.

For the table top, draw a rectangle on top of the set of four legs. Offset the rectangle outward and pull it up. To make the table top more interesting, you can also extrude a Follow Me face around the table top (Figure 4-42).

Figure 4-48 shows a house with a thick, overhanging roof. The roof is based on a 2D Follow Me face, which is extruded around the top face of the building. The resulting roof faces are intersected and trimmed.

The problem discussed in this section deals with different Follow Me faces that are extruded around edges of the same shape. In these cases, you might have difficulty selecting a path in advance, particularly if edges are broken by other operations. The solution is to copy a set of edges elsewhere so that they can be easily selected. Another problem encountered in the same model is that two sets of Follow Me faces within the same closed shape can interfere with one another. The solution here is to temporarily move one of the faces away, run Follow Me on it, and then move it back into place. After all faces are in place, they can be intersected and trimmed.

Start with a box and remove the top. Paint the four sides with a material from the Fencing material category (Figure 4-50). Many of these fencing materials have alpha transparency, which means the white background of each image is interpreted by SketchUp as transparent.

Using the faces of the box group to draw on, draw two identical rectangles in opposite corners on which to make the Follow Me faces. On one face, draw an arc section for the skate ramps (shown in Figure 4-52 in beige) and on the other, draw a section for steps (shown in green).

The Follow Me path for this face is another extended path, going past the back of the tub steps, so the curved walls will be easy to trim behind the steps. Select all of the top edges of the box as the Follow Me path (not including the edge along the back face) and run Follow Me on this face. This creates the curvy walls of the hot tub. If you have extra vertical faces around the tub, erase them (Figure 4-68).

In this recipe, you will model a pair of glasses. The frame around each lens proceeds along a 3D path, which is the intersection of a partial sphere and the frame shape. In the Other Uses section, the same technique is used to create a window frame around a curved window.

In Front view, in some blank space next to the lens, draw a shape for the lens frame (Figure 4-78). My frame is a simple oval (created by using the Scale tool on a circle), but you could use a rectangle with rounded corners, a star, or whatever shape you want.

Enter the RoundCorner Ruby script by Fredo6. You activate the tool, pick the edges you want to round (or fillet), specify a couple of parameters, and hit Enter. Really great tools are ones that save hours of nitpicky, repetitive work; by this definition, RoundCorner is an all-star.

Pick the edges you want to round by clicking them. Click again to deselect an edge. You can also click a face to select all of its edges, or a vertex (where endpoints meet) to select its connected edges.

Creating boxes with sharp corners is what sketchup is good at, and this is usually great for buildings, but not for most products. Now with this plugin the door is opened for mechanical and product designers to flood in. Well recommended.

I just purchased Sketchup 2013 which I love for all of my concepts at work, however I can not find another round corner tool. The problem I am having with this extension is on the Sketchup Start it kicks up an error stating 2b1af7f3a8