Fastes way to make Curved Interlocking Shelf Unit in Sketchup

The 3dhouse plugin Sketchup has much model to quickly draw half joints shelves. The model library already has 2-way draw half joints , just need to manually draw more curves to create curved shelves assembled with half joints shelves

Video tutorial:

Step 1: Load half joints model

The model is highly customizable, you can adjust the model structure as you like. The purpose of this step is that you will have a standard size and structure to prepare for the next step to create a curve for the shelf. Adjustable parameters of the model

• Resize height, width, depth
• Change the depth of the mount, because the cut is curved, adjust the depth to 2/3 so that the curve does not cut through the mount.
• Hide 4 outer borders
• Change board thickness
• Change the number of panels horizontally and vertically

Set the panel count and overall size in Step 1 — not later. Once you run Clean Dynamic in Step 2 the model stops being a Dynamic Component, so every parameter field disappears and any resize after that just scales the geometry (it will not re-cut or re-space the half joints). Lock your grid here while it is still parametric.

Step 2: Manually create curves

• Select 3dshouse plugin’s
  
• Clean Dynamic tool click model to remove the dynamic feature, weld the panels together. Clean Dynamic is required before manual fix.
• Go to the mount bar group, use the divide command to divide the mount bar line into 4 parts. The purpose of creating a capture point.
• Use the Arch line command to draw a curve through 2 points, drag away the excess, do the same for the remaining bars
• Erase excess faces and lines.
• Copy similar groups

The native 2-Point Arc only produces a perfectly circular arc, so all your shelves end up sharing the same radius — which is exactly the look you want here. If you ever need each shelf to follow a different free-form sweep, the native Arc tool cannot do it; you would need a spline through the divided points (e.g. Fredo6’s BZ Spline / Catmull tool). Two more things that trip people up on this step: dividing the mount bar into 4 gives you the inference endpoints to snap to — turn on Length Snapping off and just hover until the green endpoint shows, otherwise the arc binds to the wrong segment. And because Clean Dynamic welds the panels into a single solid, you must double-click into the correct group before cutting, or the arc lands on the outer wrapper group and erasing the excess will delete a whole panel.

Step 3: Nesting with plugin ABF

Nesting with plugin Abf to export drawing CNC

ABF only nests geometry that is genuinely flat — any panel that still has a curved edge as part of a 3D solid will be skipped or exported wrong. That is why the curved cut in Step 2 has to leave each board as a clean flat face before you hand it to ABF: the plugin flattens panels and lays them out for the sheet, but it does not slice solids or read cutouts that interrupt a flat surface. ABF runs on Windows SketchUp only (it has no Mac build), and it exports DXF with separate layers for cut vs. mill/engrave lines, so your CAM software can assign tool paths per layer in one pass instead of re-selecting curves by hand.