Drawing with freehand tool is not smooth

SketchUp
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1

hi all
i need to draw a free hand drawing so it will remain visible through styles as lineart. however when I try using the freehand tool the lines are not smooth (or rather the curves). I know circles do not exist in sketchup and a circle is made up of small straight lines. Is there a way to increase the smoothness of it? I dont think its my computer being slow (i7 32gb ram). It does help a bit if I draw slower but not that much.

or else maybe is there a way to import a vector drawing or pdf that is detected as lineart in sketchup? (I dont)

cheers

2

You could import a .dxf that you exported from something like Inkscape.

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woa ok had no idea about this, gonna try it shortly hopefully it works!! thankssss
will keep you updated

4

There are also extensions available (some free) to draw Bezier and other spline curves with SketchUp. Depending on the shapes you need, you might be able to string together some splines, arcs, etc.

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worked like a charm! thanks again

@TDahl importing from inkscape does the trick, but i still thank you for your input/help, would have gone that way if not

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hi again. is it possible by any chance to wrap a dxf image around an object? I tried doing it like a jpeg, importing it and snapping to a point but it doesnt work, since it’s laid flat on floor/ground as soon as imported.
thanks in advance and sorry for the bother

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An imported .dxf is not an image. It comes into SketchUp as geometry. Depending on exactly what you are doing you might be able to drape those edges onto a curved surface using Drape in the Sandbox tools or maybe it works to project those edges onto the curved surface by first creating faces for the imported geometry and using Push/Pull to push it through the surface after which you would use Intersect Faces. Or maybe Shape Bender would be able to create a bent copy of the component.

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oh my, sounds complicated… i’m still not that proficient. i’ll look into reading more about each of your suggested wording since i don’t know about them, but seems like there’s no short way of doing it.
thanks as always

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So, you don’t need the drawing to continue being workable as vector? It’s certainly possible to wrap any drawing onto any shape once you have converted to raster and imported as an image within SketchUp. Native SketchUp has a few tools for curving materials but they are clunky, I recommend diving into the SketchUV plugin.

A lot of ads but otherwise an excellent course on SketchUV here:

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sorry for the late reply and thanks for the video link. unfortuantely I’m not looking into raster since I want the drawing to still be visible in the geometry visuals so it has to remain as paths. Powerful video though for those who are looking to fully render visuals