Distance between images / JPG renders / Notes under images

Hi there, fellow Sketchup enthusiasts,

I’m trying to build a lot of 2D models for DJ riders and made standarized images listed in the top of the file for this. I tagged them all as ‘Items’. By copying the items and from the section above and putting them down on the axis I can build them case-by-case and make it’s all in a straight line. Please find an example below

Now, I’m running into a few issues unfortunately which I can’t seem to resolve in a neat way.

  1. How do I make sure the distance between each image/object/entity is exactly the same? See the bottom half of the example (this would be the render).

  2. If I hide the images tagged as ‘Items’ and render a file it comes with a lot of white space, how can I make sure it only renders a small white rectangle around the setup?

  3. Below each image I want to make a small note in the middle of the image. I tried the text tool but it gets a little messy.

Any help is greatly appreciated, if my questions need further clarification please let me know.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best,
Jop

Are you doing this in LayOut? It sounds like you should be. You can insert the images and distribute them across the page and you can add text in the form of plain text boxes or labels with leaders.

If for some reason you have to do this in SketchUp. Create components that include the images. Then you can set the component origin so it provides the spacing from the neighbor automatically. After importing the images, explode them and immediately create a component for each one. Place the component’s origin over to the side by the required spacing.

Once you have the components/images placed in the model, use Zoom Extents and then create a scene. Save the file and send to LayOut for adding the text.

Thanks for the quick reply @DaveR!

I was doing it in Sketchup actually, I’m pretty to new to this so didn’t hear of LayOut before. Anyways, this looks exactly what I’m looking for indeed!

It seems I can only scale the images though while I have exact width and length measures of each item (to make sure the proportions are correct), is it possible to add that for each image too just like in Sketchup?

You can include them in Scaled drawings in LO. I’d be inclined to draw a few lines in LO using the Scaled drawing feature maybe to create a simple, temporary grid and then insert the images and snap them to the grid points. Before you do any of this, though, use an imaged editor to tightly crop the images so there’s no surrounding border.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to use SketchUp, a 3D modeling application to handle 2D images. If you aren’t going to have 3D models of the devices, keep it simple and just work in LO.

Ah yes, I see. The scaled drawing does come in handy!

The problem though is that Layout does not import the files with the right dimensions. For each image I went into Photoshop and rendered it with the exact real life dimensions. Once I load them into LayOut it’s all out of proportion again.

Render from Layout:

Real life example: http://www.ginosrotaryrental.be/images/friends/FRIEND%201%20HUNEE.jpg

Is there workaround for this?

You’d have to resize the images.

If you all you are doing is laying out photos on a page, maybe you should be using some image editing software instead.