Noticed that exporting 2d images out of SketchUp comes out with jagged edges like no antialiasing is applied. However, on-screen it looks perfectly fine.
See attachment for example, both output in 1564x890px. My screen resolution is 1920x1080 scaled at 100%.
TLDR: Is there a way to manipulate the graphical output of the exporter to line up better with what’s represented on screen?
Have you turned on antialiasing in your image export settings?
I like to export images to a very high resolution with no antialiasing, and to downsample the image to the final desired size afterwards in my image editor (Photoshop). This gives me better quality and thinner lines than direct export.
Note too that for images with flat colour areas, like the ones from SketchUp, using the JPG format with compression produces ugly compression artifacts. That is why I prefer to use PNG.
Took me a moment to find the options, but the antialiasing option is checked.
I see, I shall keep this in mind for other projects, thank you.
Atm I just take a screenshot and crop out the UI in my image editor (Paint net), this quality is more than adequate for what I need. I was just wondering if I could tweak the exporter so that I can skip 2 steps in the process, as I need to repeat this handling 50+ times for my current project.
I haven’t deliberately used the JPG format for 15 years, PNG is far superior for all my illustrative needs.
Using a screenshot application like the Snipping tool or Greenshot would help you skip some steps in your workflow.
Already use Gyazo.
I could crop it however I like. But I don’t want image drift as I can’t crop pixel-perfect with it, so I crop rough and crop the UI out with paint net.
Have you tried exporting the image at larger than screen size? Or using LayOut?
I’m with DaveR on this one. I always export to at least double my screen size (3840x1600) as to make my image seem sharper. You can always scale down in an image program later.
I used Photoshop to compare your two images, and they are identical. Did you add the same image twice? Can you show a 2D export that has the jaggy lines?
Forgot to reply. My apologies.
@DaveR I ran some tests with this but found that this didn’t improve the line quality all that much + that I need to adjust the line thickness to keep clarity.
@SeanB I understand the reasoning. however, I wanted to simplify the process and 1564x890 is plenty for my needs.
@colin They are different. The image above is the 2d export.
You can see it by the pixel fade, see image below.
This (1564x890) is actually pretty small by modern standards. This is what I get with these settings (full resolution for my main monitor).
Found this post from Dan:
Assuming he’s right, the 2D export is doing its own thing, and isn’t affected by the preferences settings, but screenshots are. I can ask whether the exporter could be updated for higher antialiasing values (at the moment it looks like it is doing 4x), but these are third party libraries that don’t get updated much.
Exporting a larger image and using an image editor to scale down to the size you want, would work around the problem.
Oke, I sat down and exported a slew of different resolutions and settings to compare them to the screenshot version. See image below.
I picked some resolutions from your recommendations and played with the line scaling to get it as close to the screenshot as possible. However, it only accepts a single digit after the comma. Any more is just ignored by the system it seems. So I got stuck between lines that were slightly too bold or too faint.
In the end, the AA is present (see bottom right for how it looks without) but seems to run at a minimal setting. Doing the bare minimum. Screenshots are still the best quality you can get, only getting sharper if you output your screen on a higher resolution.
I’ve been doing this even before I started this post, bringing it up to find a way to save clicks in this repetitive task.
Workaround starts to kinda become Sketchup’s motto at this point. I’m looking at you thin surface Z-fighting and camera clipping.
LOL, I like it 
