I need to routinely hatch irregular areas for landscaping plans. How do I easily define these irregular areas for hatching in LayOut? Is is possible to copy & paste an outline of the area from SketchUp into LayOut. Or, can I hatch the existing area in the viewport?
I would make a scene in SU that shows just the regions you want to hatch. Turn off all the other layers. Set the style to Hidden Line and the background to white. In LO, set a viewport to that scene and stack with the scene showing the other entities. Render this viewport as Vector and then explode it. This will give you lines in LO and you should be able fill those with the hatch patterns. Probably sounds more difficult than it is.
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@DaveR That is sort of the path I was going to take but hoping for something simpler. Tedious but not difficult. Thanks.
If you plan it out in SketchUp first, it shouldn’t be that bad. Good luck.
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I have been thinking this for a long time, in order to keep the link between SU/LO try this and tell me if it doable:
Make a scene with the area you want to hatch.
Create new style using the hatch image as a watermark, selecting background and create mask checkbox setting.
Set the lines styles according the final presentation you want to achieve.
Create the viewport for this scene in hybrid or raster mode.
If this is possible, you could modify the hatched area (SU) and update in LO.
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@Charevir Would this work with multiple hatches in the same scene. Sometimes we have several hatched areas in one seen that need to go to LayOut.
You can only have one watermark background image per scene.
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Here is what I need to hatch. Each enclosed area is a group in SketchUp (no shared border lines). Each enclosed area requires a unique hatch and/or line weight in LayOut.
Following your instructions in SketchUp everything goes into LayOut as expected. Again, following your instructions, within LayOut I am left with one large group. After ungrouping, everything reverts reverts to individual line segments with all SketchUp groups removed. Since one hatch surface cannot share a common line with another I am not happy.
I am able to select lines and change Stroke size. I cannot however select group of lines to enclose a surface and fill or pattern. I clicked on all the buttons available but come up wanting.
What am I missing, doing incorrectly.
Thanks
Hmmm…
How about sharing the SKP file for that thing. I’ll show you how to do it.
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That’s a PNG file. How about attaching the SKP instead?
and another thought, why not do the hatching in Sketchup?
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Forum Post.skp (101.8 KB)
Ooops, apologies.
Thinking about the hatch in SketchUp option. We do full color/texture 3D models and working with others who will only get confused with extra/hidden layers. Also, need line weights for hatch borders. I’m in a shop that does AutoCAD plans and SketchUp models. I convinced them to migrate to all SketchUp & LayoOut. No pressure.
OK. Three groups, each on a different layer in SketchUp. One scene for each layer.
Send to LayOut. Set the viewport to the first scene, render it as Vector and then use Edit>Copy to copy it to the clipboard. Right click and explode the viewport. Select the shape and add the hatch texture to it. Group the shape if needed. Edit>Paste, change to the next scene, explode apply hatch. Rinse and repeat for each scene in the SU file.
Or, as I suggested earlier, add the hatches as materials in SketchUp and skip the exploding and such.
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Kewl Thanks! I will get to work and see about replicating these results. Also seriously considering the hatch in SketchUp option.
Doing the hatching in SketchUp makes a heck of a lot more sense if the model is going to need to be edited. Still, if you need to be able to show different line weights for the borders, set up the groups on different layers and use different scenes to show them.
By the way, you weren’t using layers correctly in that SKP. The proper use is to leave Layer 0 active at all times and leave all edges and faces on Layer 0. Then only groups and components get assigned to other layers.
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What you saw was a cut/paste from another file with many layers. Purged and moved everything to Layer 0 to shrink the file size.
Not everything made it to Layer 0.
My first clue that not all edges and faces are on Layer 0 is the blank layer drop down in Entity Info when the geometry within the group is selected.
It’s not a big deal for this example but this kind of thing can cause problems if it’s common in your regular modeling.
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Yeah, that’s what I get for using someone else’s model. The entire file it like that. Thought it would be faster than making my own from scratch. Guess not. Curious, I did delete all layers and move all to Layer 0. The good part about working with other people’s models is that I get to learn what they know and don’t know.
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Wow that is a mess. Thanks for pointing that out. Later I will take a closer look.