Hey, what is up nation?
In this session I'm going to teach you how you can
import STL files into Sketchup and edit them.
I'm here on Thingiverse and this is where I love to come to find cool 3d
things to print. The STL files in here are great, sometimes they'll even have
Sketchup files so you don't have to worry about this whole thing. And they're
not paying me to say that I think of vs. is just a really awesome website I don't
know if they make money if there's a way to even do that on here, but so what I'm
gonna do is just download some STL files, import it and then show you what we can
do to edit it, once we have it imported. So we're just gonna explore a little bit,
see what kind of cool stuff they have, so let's try. Things, explore popular, so what
kind of cool stuff they have. And this is just like a great way to see what things
you could print to it might help generate some ideas for what you might
be able to do. Should I these guys, these are kind of cool-looking, okay so what
you do is you click on that and then you'll see more images so you can see
like is this really what I want, there are some views and you can click the
thing of U which lets you rotate Kerman like sketchup does, so you're like oh
yeah this is definitely exactly what i want, so then you can click thing files
and they have different files here, so these are like different versions that
they uploaded. You can try each one, I'm just gonna pick one, just click that, you
see it downloads in the bottom left here, I'm gonna open up my sketchup, just dock
this over here, eventually there you go. Put it in port and then in
here there's an option for STL right here, a stereo lithography files, I'm gonna
click that, look at my downloads folder, click it and that's gonna bring it in.
We've imported our STL file into Sketchup, it's opened and you can see
there's a lot of extra information here that we don't want these extra lines so
if we're trying to edit this, it's gonna be a huge pain. We have to select, make a
lot more selections that we want to and we don't want to have to do that, and you
can always come in here to the group and press e for the eraser tool and you can
come in I'm holding ctrl here to select these lines you can see it's taking a
little bit longer than you would think, and delete them, but I don't have to do
that for all of these and you don't have to, so then we undo that and what we're
gonna do is we're gonna use a plug-in that will do all of this for us. But
before I do that I just want to show you something, I opened this a before did
it's just to check and make sure this is gonna work, you can see that there are
some faces that aren't connected, so this is in the file itself when it imports it
may have just lost this geometry, the file on Thingiverse looked fine, but
maybe the file is just corrupt in some sort of way, so we want to be able to
repair that by not having to go through and draw every line, so I'm gonna show
you how to do that as well. But first we're going to come in here, go
into this group, hit ctrl+a, command a if you're on Mac to select all, go to the
extensions and I've installed cleanup 3, I'm gonna go to clean here, I'm gonna
make sure the scope is selected, I've taken off purged and used this means
it'll delete any components you're not using, doesn't really matter for this
think merge coplanar faces yes, ignore UV the really thing that I want is a race
straight edges it's like the most important thing and repair split edges,
so I'm gonna clean up here, it's gonna give me an estimated time and the bottom
thinks it's gonna be 40 minutes but it's just a few seconds actually.
I'm gonna fix some things, so we're good, right! But now these little discrepancies
are much clearer, so I'm gonna open this, I'm gonna select these, I just go around
orbit, see what's going on, select all these I'm not gonna do it for all of
these but you can see I could just come and draw a line, let me just show you
that real quick, you may need to turn on hidden geometry then I'll give you a
little bit of better insight of what did you oh man she's doing, so if I close
this, you know, close. And you could go through and do that for all of them, but
I have installed another plug-in, called "A draw face creator", there will be a
link to these two below, these two plugins that I'm using, I'm just gonna
select these instances, I'm just gonna do a few for now, say one these two, right. So
I have these instances, I'm going to go to the extensions and raw face creator,
it's gonna take a few seconds to think and you can see that it made faces where
all those little openings were. So that's just a much quicker way than selecting
all the lines to do everything. And if you choose the whole thing it's probably
gonna mess up, so just do it a little bit at a time. But now it's in here and if I
want to shrink this, I can certainly do that, so if I select all of these faces,
let's say, I wanted a little bit more variety and how this looks, and I wanted
to shrink this, got one more to select, S for scale, and then scale this up. So now
I have like a different aperture. So that's what we have.
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you have any questions about anything in sketchup, or design, or architecture in
the comments below. And as always, be hacking!
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