Delve into the crucial feature of AutoHeal in SketchUp, as it enables seamless recreation of faces without redrawing the entire shape. Learn how the software's understanding of geometry elements — edges and faces — facilitates the auto healing process and the creation of 3D volumes.
Key Insights
- SketchUp primarily comprises two geometry elements: edges and faces. Deleting a face leaves the edges intact, while removing an edge eliminates the entire face.
- AutoHeal is a feature in SketchUp that aids in automatically recreating faces that have been deleted, without needing to redraw the entire shape. It also supports the creation of faces from new geometry.
- AutoHeal is not only instrumental in recovering deleted faces but also crucial for closing 3D volumes. It aids in restoring faces at the bottom of 3D shapes, thereby creating a volume.
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Before we begin to model our course datasets, I would like to look at a key feature in SketchUp, which is called AutoHeal. SketchUp has two main geometry elements, edges and faces.
If I draw a rectangle and look in my entity info dialog box right here in the default tray, the rectangle is considered a face and all the lines bound in that rectangle are considered edges. If you delete a face, you can see that all the lines are still connected and the rectangle can exist without a face inside of them. I will undo.
But if you delete an edge, you can see that it will delete the entire face as well as the edge. Throughout our course, we may accidentally or on purpose delete edges or faces and we may want to bring them back. So in SketchUp, we don't need to redraw the entire shape to recreate that face again.
I will undo that. You can use the line tool and click from this endpoint to this endpoint and SketchUp will auto heal the face. SketchUp understands that we want our faces to reappear, so it guesses that it should refill the entire face.
This works for new geometry as well. If I draw a shape around my screen and click the last endpoint, SketchUp will automatically create a face from that shape that I drew. We want to be careful, however, if you're starting to draw shapes and you accidentally go in the blue direction and you think that this is a 2D shape and you connect it and it doesn't connect, you drew in the blue axis which isn't on the same 2D plane.
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So SketchUp will not be eligible to create a face from that shape. Auto fill is extremely useful when trying to close 3D volumes. I will delete all of this.
If I was to draw a more complex shape, say two donuts next to each other, draw a rectangle, offset that, I'll triple click and then copy this over. If I was to push and pull the first donut, you can see that has white faces and there's a solid bottom. If I was to push and pull the second donut, still white face, but the bottom is no longer there.
If I want to bring back that face at the bottom, I can go back to my line tool and auto heal the 3D object to create a volume. We will discuss workflows using auto heal later in our course, but for now just understand that it is a key element in SketchUp. In the next video we will begin to build our course datasets.
