From the course: SketchUp Tips

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Control softening and smoothing

Control softening and smoothing - SketchUp Tutorial

From the course: SketchUp Tips

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Control softening and smoothing

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- [Instructor] This week I'm going to talk about softening and smoothing. These two concepts are essential to understand if you want to represent curved surfaces in the best possible light. For example, let's draw a circle and then pull that up, using push pull, generating a cylinder. This surface right here is actually both softened and smoothed, although you might not have known it before, but that's what gives this the appearance of being round. We don't see any edges there, that means that the edges are softened, but the edges really do exist, and if you zoom in closely on this, you'll see that the edges are made up of straight segments. Every surface in SketchUp ultimately is composed of a flat planar surface. So, why don't we see that here? We see kind of a strange little gradient where these edges are. This is called smoothing, and it's a trick. It blends these surfaces together. It looks pretty good, especially if you zoom out, it looks like a cylinder, but when you get really…

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