Im new to sketchup and only played around with photoshop and GIMP so im new to 3D modelling and only been on the program for around 3 hours. As you may have guessed i’m still pretty bad having not had time to properly practice. Anyway I am looking to design 3 wolves heads in to a metal side case of a PC.If its possible the coloured parts would be the bits that are cut out of the case .Eventually its a project as im in to PC case modding and would like to take it to a company and get it case cut in to the side. How would I go around this and is there a tutorial that could help me that you could think of. Any help would be a benefit right now as im completely stuck. Thank you in advance
Import the image as an image and use the Line and Freehand tools to trace the edges to create loops to define the openings. Place the outline on the computer case side and use Push/Pull to make the holes. (There are other options for the steps you use but it amounts to the same thing.) Or use TIG’s Image Trimmer (from Sketchucation) to automatically create the outlines. Be patient because it can take a while to process an image as complex as yours.
Thats really impressive that you have made that and definitely helped me on where to start. I appreciate the help and also the fact that you have posted that to help me with my own project. Do you mind if I ask how long it took you to make it?
Since I had to find an image and edit it to make the background transparent before importing the PNG file to SketchUp, I suppose it took about 15 minutes. I let TIG’s Image Trimmer do the heavy lifting to trace the edges and create the faces show on the left so that made it relatively fast.
Just been playing around on Sketchup with the image trimmer and find that it doesnt properly select the outline of my PNG. I will upload the PNG here to see if im doing anything wrong but it seems to be very basic outline and doesnt outline the inner face such at the nose eyes etc
TIG’s extension is in effect doing a raster to vector conversion, just targeting SU edges instead of vector file ones. I doubt you can find anything that would automatically do much better because, as Dave has noted, it would have to fabricate/infer data that simply isn’t there in the original image.
You could use an image editor to enlarge the image but it will just interpolate the pixels, producing a larger but blurry image. You could then edit the blurry image to try to sharpen it and eliminate interpolation artifacts. But that’s going to be a lot of work - possibly about as much as redrawing the image yourself using a paint program!
Jeez this is harder than I orginally thought. Guess thats why its a specialist program. I tried using this picture instead
Its a PNG but it just makes my computer not respond whenever I try to image trim it on Sketchup, could this be easier in a 2D program as im a beginner? Also if it makes my computer not respond is there any cure or will I have to have a more powerful PC
Look closely at that image. You can see the edges of the black regions are very rough and pixelated. That means Image Trimmer will have a lot of work to do. As I said in my first reply, have patience and let it do its thing.
It would be better if you could use a higher resolution image so the edges aren’t so rough.
How will you use the resulting SketchUp file to get the side of the real computer’s case cut? Maybe you don’t need a 3D model of it. Who is doing the cutting and what sort of tool with they use to do it? Maybe you should find out what they need first.
Another option would be Inkscape svg → dxf → SketchUp. This image shows a wolf in svg format in Inkscape, exported as dxf, imported to SketchUp using some guy’s dxf importer.
Yet another option, other than relying on yet more apps or plugins, would be to simply trace around the pixelated image with the line tool, making any adjustments and abbreviations as you go. All you need to watch out for is that the axis hints don’t show up as blue as you draw each line segment. That would mean that the line was, in fact, coming straight at you rather than along the image.
It would probably take about 30 minutes, based on how long it took me to do the ears.
@ryanharbird498, do you know what type of file you need for sending to the cutter? You may not need SketchUp at all. In my previous example, Inkscape exports to dxf which your cutter may be able to use directly.
Very true. CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator will do the same. In fact if the cutter accepted pdf or even .ai files you could even do it directly from Photoshop
I do not know at the moment but im just trying to make it 2D and hope the company im using can make something out of that. Its only a single design in metal so I dont see any reason it would need to be 3D. Looking at the current task now I think im being too ambitious with this. The idea was to put LEDs behind the wolves head so it shines through, thought it would look pretty cool. As this was my first real experience with any 3D modelling tools. I will probably look into going in to something a bit easier for my first time designing
