Twisted spiral deformation in SketchUp - Skill Builder

[Music] hey guys it's Erin so I had an idea for a skill builder it's a little off the wall and it's a little bit of just for fun but it really is a very cool technique that I really thought that I should share this will require one extension and that's a Weld extension there's a couple of them out there I'll link to the one that I use from semester in the comments below or No maybe I use the one from TIG I don't know there's a couple of weld tools out there and all the weld tools do is take separate lines and make them into a single curve that's a requirement for this workflow but other than that all Sketchup tools to make some really cool shapes like the ones we see on the screen so I'm just going to go ahead and hop right in alright so I can already hear the voice is saying I could just use follow me to make this thing yes you could make a shape similar to this as follow me but not these exact shapes one of the cool things about these shapes is if I grab this right here and I scale about the middle watch what happens to my shape I can actually deform the Bulge and change the entire shape of this I don't know this vase type shape the other thing is if I come in here and I'll go to view and show my hidden geometry these are all made of spirals see how this the geometry spirals around like that it's not a straight follow me where everything goes around the circle actually the geometry actually spirals around so I wanted to show you guys how to do this I think this is an older technique this is an older thing I remember picking up from the forum I think maybe box on our forum posted this but it really is cool and it's it's worth seeing and worth doing so we're gonna hop over here to a blank slate keep going get off screen there you go all right I'm gonna start simply with a circle I'm going to click and draw a circle this circle has 24 side that's important note because we're going to do is we're gonna make some spirals so I'm gonna look at it from the side I'm gonna grab one of the points it does have to be a point I can't go through a midpoint or a long line but from the end point and I'm a draw a line vertically up the blue axes and then back to the next point so that's all I've done so far just that alright now I'm going to erase this piece I'm going to take this one and I'm gonna use rotate to rotate that so pre-select the line hover over the edge go to the center and rotate it from one point option to copy and I'm going to type 23 X ENTER so I did just a radial array of those edges all the way around now what I want to do is go into select and select all the edges I just created I'm going to use the Move command along with option again to make a copy vertically straight up and again I'm gonna hit 23 X all right so what I just did was I just made 24 full spirals so one of these goes all the way around as it goes up the side and ends up at the top one of the things I want to do now is I want to actually take one of these curves and weld it I'm gonna do this by first so I have an issue right here so one thing I could do is I could hold down my shift key follow this and click on all 24 sides not undoable it's actually not painful to do but we're here for skills right not not grunting through selection so I want to find a way to quickly and easily if I just double click on one of these nothing triple click gets the whole thing so I don't have an easy way to do it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come into this circle at the bottom I'm going to double click on the circle that's going to highlight both the surface and the line around it temporarily I'm just going to right click and say group that's gonna isolate that geometry from one of these spirals so if I triple click on one spiral now you can see what highlights is just that single spiral now I can take that spiral and I can run my weld extension again whatever weld you have go ahead and run it there at that point what that will do is give me one continuous curve there alright so at this point I want to get rid of all the other lines so we'll select everything except by one curve and delete them now I can take this curve and I'm gonna do the same thing I did before I'm going to use rotate to move from one option to the next point 23x enter alright so now each of these is a full curve now what I can do and this is actually this is interesting because I'm gonna make a copy of this I'm just going to grab it option and I'm going to copy it over here because there's a couple of things I can do at this point I'm going to explode this and I'm going to push pull it up to one of these top points at that point I've really created everything I need because right now so these are still you can see I pick one these are still complete curves see how it goes all the way around if I grab this top circle and hit scale grab one of these corner points I hit the modifier key so I scale the scale about the middle and now I can actually create those distortions just by scaling that top circle I was saying before it's something else a good show here is I could take this circle modifier key to copy straight up and then I'll actually explode both of these because what I can do right now is grab this circle and see I got kind of a wire cage right now same thing still applies though because if I scale about the middle here my wires go and rescale so this is this right here is what you cannot get from follow me follow me can give you something similar to this if I was to take this shape right here soft and smooth soften that thing completely I could actually get something like that how to follow me this however is something that follow me can't do and this is cool because I could use something like pipes along path or something like that to actually create some intricate pipe work or I could even do something like take this whole thing and copy it so it crosses over itself and end up with a full real wire mesh so that is a pretty cool thing that you can do with Sketchup like I said I'm not sure that you have any workflows that are dying for this kind of thing but it is possible that you'll see something a future where you'll want to create shapes like this and like I said follow me just doesn't quite do the same thing full credit to box for creating this it was a little while ago that he posted this like years ago so I'm 90% sure it was box and and he has some awesome gifts he's worth checking out on our forum or on his Facebook page too if you like this go ahead and click on like and subscribe to we create a couple videos a week usually and you'll be notified every time one of them comes out if you're subscribed most importantly though please do leave a comment more and more of the videos we create are because of the comments we're hearing from you guys and we'd love that I mean I do like making videos like this but like a lot more when they're showing something you want to see thank you you you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 26,395

Rating: 4.9714866 out of 5

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling, Spiral, Cylinder, Deform, Scale, skill builder

Id: Z8115uPAdKE

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019