drawing a cloud lift in Sketchup

[roger wiegand]

I just took a great two day class in sketchup at the North Bennett St. School. It was fantastic for getting my head around some aspects of this alternately frustrating and fascinating tool.

As a first real project I'm trying to draw a Greene and Greene-inspired end table I'd like to build. Much of it is going fine, but I'm going crazy trying to draw a cloud lift shape. It seems that pretty much the only curves available are circles, which look really kludgy, and even then they do things like snap to points I seem to have no control over and overrun the tangents I'm trying to attach them to. (example below) I've been trying to join arcs and line segments, then try to smooth out the corners with smaller arcs. Is there some better way to go about this? Or should I just revert to pencil and paper? (this drawing would have been completed many hours ago without the benefit of computer aid!)

Screen Shot 2019-02-09 at 9.42.07 AM.png

I'm using the free version, so add-ons aren't available to me. I have to say the current web version is incredibly buggy and unresponsive. It's really not inspiring me to lay down $700 to find out if the pro version is better! Is there a better drawing tool for woodworkers? I don't really need 3d drawing capability, but most CAD programs I've tried are way too complicated and unintuitive for the sort of thing I want to do. There was a program called MacDraft back in 1986 or so that was perfect-- it could do everything I wanted in a very clean. simple way, but alas, it disappeared.

[Bob Lang]

You have two issues. The first is drawing a cloud lift and the second is drawing a cloud lift in SketchUp. You can still get a download of SketchUp Make 2017, but I just did this in SketchUp Free, the online version.
SKP-CL1.jpg

The two horizontal lines are 1/2" apart, and the two vertical guidelines are 1/2" away from the vertical line. A good cloudlift arc isn't a quarter circle. The end points of the arcs are the intersections of the guidelines and the horizontal lines and the center of the short vertical line.

SKP-CL2.jpg

Click on an end point to start the arc and keep your finger off the left mouse button. As you move to the end point the arc follows the mouse cursor and turns cyan when the arc is tangent. Click the second end point then click again while the arc is still cyan to establish the bulge. Repeat for the second arc. Here is an image of the results:

SKP-CL3.jpg

Hope this helps,

Bob Lang

[roger wiegand]

Much better, thank you! I think I'm still going to want to compare it to hand drawn ones before making a template, but this is much closer to what I was trying to do. I was trying to link two quarter circles, the bigger radius looks much better.

Now they just need to add the "make a beautiful curve" tool!

[Dave Richards]

There are several different "make a beautiful curve" tools available.

[Bob Lang]

Look at lots of original Greene & Greene shapes. They are subtle and not mechanical - not the easiest thing to do with CAD. If you go with something drawn by hand you can always make a template and flip the curves along a center line to get them to match. Almost all curves in original pieces have some variation in them, and most people trying to make reproductions miss these details or take the easy way out. This is especially true regarding edges. But it is the subtlety that makes the originals special.

Bob Lang

[roger wiegand]

Wish I had access to originals! You can't even take pictures in places like the Gamble House, much less pull things apart to make measurements. I've got Darrell Peart's books, which are quite helpful.

10 hours of fighting sketchup tooth and nail to produce a kindergarten level drawing of my table today has left me a little frazzled. I just found out that after spending a bunch of time carefully creating components that I hoped would allow me to quickly try out a number of options that the slick tools for swapping components en masse are only available in the pro version.

I'm ready to kill either my mouse or the person who decided this should be a web app-- I'm not sure where the problem lies for sure, but I suspect the need for a web connection because my trackpad is also similarly flakey. (I've got a consistent 80 Mb down/35 up connections, so it's not just a question of raw speed) The zoom, pan, and orbit functions are all extremely jerky and rather random. I'll be zooming in and all of a sudden with that last click of the mouse wheel all of a sudden my model has launched itself off to Venus or something and only the "zoom extents" tool under orbit will even find it again. Similar issues on pan and orbit, where at the end of pan, for example the image suddenly zooms so my model is the size of my house. This last is all just ranting from frustration; if I weren't too cheap to pony up the $700 I probably wouldn't be having these problems. I'll admit it is disingenuous to complain about a free program, but I am now thinking of going back to Illustrator for my drawings, as imperfect a tool as it is for this purpose.

[Dave Richards]

Roger, you should contact me and I'll help you out.

[roger wiegand]

Well, this morning, with a fresh cup of coffee, I decided to put my experimentalist hat on and dug out an ancient wired mouse from the depths of my desk drawer to swap for the fancy wireless mouse I've been using-- voila! the navigation issues that drove me crazy yesterday are pretty much gone. Boy, do I feel dumb!

[roger wiegand]

Roger, you should contact me and I'll help you out.

It seems I can't send you a PM. You can email me at roger (at) carouselorgan (dot) com

Hi Dave-

Thanks for your kind offer of help on Sketchup! I just solved one of my most frustrating problems by swapping my wireless mouse for an ancient wired one, now the zoom/pan/orbit navigation that was giving me so many problems seems to be working sensibly. I still wish I could get it to work with my trackball, one long day of using a mouse and my hand hurts like the old days.

I just completed a two day class at the North Bennet Street School that has gotten me past many of the basics, but it seems that there are many tips and tricks yet to learn. As far as I can tell the web version doesn't support use of extensions-- is that correct? It seems there's lots of nifty tools (like better curves) that are only available via extensions.

Is there a workaround to substituting components in the web version? I've made a couple of different legs and would like to swap them out easily. I know I can paste the new component in, but then have to go through a bit of work to rotate and align them correctly in the model-- I've been drawing a number of guide lines that I can snap to, it takes me several minutes per leg to get them right (of course now that I can navigate more readily it may seem much quicker than it did yesterday!)

[Dave Richards]

I'll send you an e-mail and answer your questions and more.

Glad you got your mouse issues sorted.

You are correct. Currently the web based versions of SketchUp don't support the use of extensions.

As for swapping the legs, there is a way to do it in the web based version. It's not as direct as in the dsektop versions but it isn't terribly difficult. I'll make something up to show you.

[roger wiegand]

Thanks Dave, You have a serious wealth of knowledge (and are a pretty darn good teacher as well!)

[Dave Richards]

Thank you very much, sir.

I didn't get to show you the "make a beautiful curve" tool. Next time.

[Jon Nuckles]

To Dave Richards:
As an occasional Sketchup user, I generally read your responses to people's Sketchup problems. Your offers to help offline go above and beyond. Kudos to you, sir.
Jon

[Dave Richards]

Thank you Jon.

[Joe Wood]

Could you post the cloud lift skp file you came up with Dave?