Hey guys, it's Aaron. So, I saw, well I’ve seen lots of questions about this particular thing.
What do you do when you have a bunch of lines and you go to connect them but a face doesn't show up.
So, I started kind of exploring the different problems that can cause
this and I think I came up with six that were fairly realistic.
Everything else I could come up with was a variant of one of these six ways that a set
of geometry won't close. So, let's go ahead and hop in and take a look at what those are.
Okay, so you'll notice I said six but there's seven sets of lines here, well that's because we're
gonna show you what should happen of course. So, if I come over here, I have three lines one two three
and I draw a line connecting these two ends right here everything happens to be
an axis that shouldn't be, that should have no bearing on what we're actually doing but
when I connect the two points a face shows up. That's normal; that's what should happen.
All right, so let's look at the first example here, I’m going to go ahead and click, click... Oh!
It did not close. So, I would say one of the more common reasons this happened is because
a face shows up when a set of lines closes. So, anytime you have a situation where
you have those lines and they don't close, there's a chance that there's a gap in lines.
So, generally speaking, if you kind of spin around and take a look at the corners, it seems
like depending on your model, depending what you're working on, you may have a situation where you have
a corner that doesn't quite close. So if I, oh, look at this see this little, tiny gap right here
that happens and it prevents your rectangle from closing so I obviously I took the quick way out
and I just connected the two points. You probably want to figure out how it's supposed to close if
that's you know, this is not actually a rectangle anymore. But anytime you have a set of lines and
they don't close, it will not create a face. There is no rounding. There is no guessing. SketchUp
doesn't go oh these points are close enough let's just well it does do that but it's very very
small. In this case, if your points are snapped to different points right here, they don't connect
together, it doesn't close, it doesn't count. So, over here we'll go ahead and close this one
and oh same thing, that's going to be recurring thing of course, they're not going to close.
The issue with this one is a little easier to see, right here, I have geometry coming in now
this is a thing that SketchUp does, to create a face, you have to have closed geometry. You can't
have any loose geometry coming into the plane because it doesn't create a closed rectangle,
so this was a closed shape, this one right here, if it followed lines around it has a line that
comes in and doesn't go back out, it doesn't close and this is not actually a closed shape, so as
long as there's any lines coming into the geometry this is going to be an issue. So, if I get rid
of that line I just created, I’ll just get rid of this little line right here. Now, if I draw a line
oh, we're good that one closes okay keep on moving our way down here. I’m going to draw another line
here to here, uh oh, again doesn't close, what's going on? Well, one of the things you can do,
a way that you can go and check for that loose geometry that I showed before, is to do a group
select so if I come in here and do a group select like this, if there's loose geometry, it'll show up
here in entity info. Whoa, four edges, well that could be an issue, I should only have three here,
but I can't seem to find it, right? One, two, three, oh it's broken, what's going on? Okay, well
here's the issue, again I have geometry coming in but I can't see it. Something's going on because
this edge is broken, but I can't tell what it is. If you come up to view and turn hidden geometry,
this can cause issues. So, if you're working on a model that you've worked and reworked in the past,
you might have something like this with hidden yelps if you've smoothed geometry over and then
you've deleted geometry and drawn over that geometry, you may have hidden lines. A lot
of times people go, I got this wall and I can't close it up and when you go turn hidden geometry,
looks like a spider web because there's so much stuff's been moved around. Again,
just like with that little geometry in the corner, this won't close no matter what I do as long as
this line's in here, even though it's hidden. So, if I turn on hidden geometry, delete that,
and then draw that, then we close. All right, moving our way down, here's another one I’m
going to draw that line and of course it's not going to close, what's going on here? All right,
well this example is a little trickier because if I do a select, oops select just those pieces,
turn that off, I do have
just the three edges, that's all correct. The issue here, if I start moving around 3D space, look at
that, see how it's just slightly out of plane? This causes problems for people all the time.
Sometimes, it is so teeny tiny that it's out of plane, it's hard to find.
The way that you usually find an out of plane space like this is to do a little stitching. If I
connect corner to corner, it closes, but if I delete that, it goes away again. That's kind of
an indicator that I have a problem with something being out of plane. You can check your points
like this, so this, here's the x y and z location of this point. If I check every corner,
oh, I can see right there, this corner is an inch and a quarter higher than the rest of
these corners. So, what I’d want to do, is in this particular case, I’d probably use move to grab this
point and move it vertically to the same height as this. Then when I draw that last line on,
it closes up. That didn't update, get out of there. So that's the thing to look for also. All right,
we're getting there, we're almost there! I’ll draw another line right here and surprise,
it's not going to close. We still have hidden geometry on so that's not the problem. If I select
here, five edges again, that's weird, what's going on there oh, I got another broken line.
That's usually an indicator like I said that something could be going on. In this case, if
I go to tags and I have this hidden tag... oh look at that, I had a line on a hidden tag. So just because
you can't see geometry doesn't mean it's not still interfering with what you're trying to do.
If something's not acting the way it's supposed to, check hidden geometry,
that doesn't work, check hidden tags, so again I’m just going to delete that line,
draw right over top of this and it closes. All right, one last one here, I’m going to
go ahead and connect these two points on and... surprise it doesn't work. What's the deal? Well,
if I click here, you'll notice that wait I click one line looks like it all lights up.
There's a flickering line down here. If I look up here, it says it's a group. Well, that'll do it
right? So this right here, if I double click, this is a group that those four lines are in. No matter
what I do on the outside here, I am never going to get this to close, turning on hidden tags, nothing
is going to fix this because I can't interact with geometry inside of a container. So, I have
to do one of two things: one is to right click and explode to get it out, or if I want to keep
it separate just double click to enter the group and then draw my line there and then it closes.
So, like I said, there are some other situations I could think of where you
have geometry that doesn't quite close up when you wanted to, but
all of those other situations were kind of variants or slight changes to this.
These were all the situations I could think of, unique situations, I know the hidden line versus
hidden tag was similar, but it could be lumped together under geometry that's hidden it prevents
from closing, but there's two different ways to fix it so I figured it merited its own example.
So yeah, let me know if there's another way that you see that you get geometry that doesn't close,
and let me know if this helps you. If you've ever had geometry didn't close
and maybe there's a tip in here that helps you close it, let me know about that too.
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