I’m quite a bit more gray, with shorter hair overall. I’m happy to say I’m still married to the lovely young woman to my left. Even though we both had to wait endlessly for hours together while these massive print jobs spooled. I think I impressed her with my description of the angular resolving power of the human eye.
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Thanks for your comments, though not sure how that pertains to what a few users in this thread are mentioning in regards to line work or more specifically “Aliased” lines and how (if any) there is a way to control that. Maybe some are confusing resolution Vs. Anti-aliazing. Its obvious that Layout has the three modes - raster - hybrid - vector, but as i’m sure you see by my images attached, all three of them have their shortcommings, one of which I’m still convinced is a major bug, that @Trimble has yet to address and fix.
If you see my image “SKP Model View.png” you’ll see a perfectly acceptable image display of clean lines will all manner of curves, and a transparent glass surface, as viewed in Sketchup 2018.
Next image… “LAYOUT to PDF export.png” you see on the left RASTER view, I have all the possible settings up to HIGH, and still there are the Aliased lines in all the curves etc…as displayed in Layout, and also the resulting PDF. The right side shows HYBRID but then the lines behind the glass disappear.
Finally - you see the VECTOR mode option, which looses any textures, seeing-thru transparency etc…but gives a lovely line work because it is vector.
You tell me if my settings for RASTOR even when all are set to high…and that the outcome shown is as best as one can expect…then I guess that is where the story will end.
However…if I can get better line work through HYBRID or VECTOR modes…but then the lines dropping out behind the glass (transparency) is a bug or intended design by Layout?
I know Anti-aliazing will never replace a true “vector” line, which is why I hold out such hope for “Hybrid” mode, but if all my lines behind ANY transparent surface disappear, then whats the point?
As for now I’m forced to take screenshots of perspective or Arc-Viz type views (of the SKP model) for simple renders, and then place them into LO. Then revert back to the true SKP model for adding dimensions etc on my 2D views…UGH.
Ha… the thinnest was actually .1mm. For a long time Rapidograpnh made two series of line widths, one starting with .1 and the second with .13. They both clogged easily and were almost impossible to repair. Otherwise I totally agree about resolution.
What seems to most annoy people are lines they perceive as jaggy, but using Vector/Hybrid rendering would print these at the best resolution their printer can manage.
…except in my case as hopefully shown by the attached images in my last post
The jaggies are there in “RASTOR” view no matter that i use the highest settings…then the obvious (bug) or glass / transparency issue when using “HYBRID” or “VECTOR” modes…
As I replied to you in a previous thread, to simulate transparency in vector views I use this workaround:
I place my transparent materials on a different layer, and create two scenes: one with materials and the glass layer on, the other with hidden lines and glass turned off. I then overlay these in LO
I understand that transparency is not a vector property, and you always need to rasterize your image to display it. I seem to remember that this was a problem already some years before John’s photo when I used to make simple models in AutoCad and used the Hide command to create a hidden line view.
Yes you did, however my models are never that simple, and with constant revisions and changes both to the views and the model itself…this way is not such a simple workflow for my use of Sketchup.
It just irks me that if SKP can display a screen image, beautiful in all it lines, materials, transparencies, then why can’t its sibling software, LAYOUT create a similar output? Withoiut all the need for work-arounds and “fixes”.
Surely I am not the only one who is tasked with displaying glass, transparencies and heaven forbid, clean line work?
why doesn’t @Trimble just fix the bug!
It can; actually LayOut is capable of much sharper and more refined artwork than SketchUp. And without special workarounds or fixes. You just have to adjust the way you are thinking about rendering.
To get a really fair comparison, make sure you have set the zoom menu in LayOut to “100%” At this view level, Raster and Vector linework should appear to be identical both on screen and in print. If you zoom in, you will see aliasing in raster rendered views, though not in vector rendered views. Zooming in will have no impact on print quality.
Right- that’s my point, I guess. There isn’t really a bug to fix here, though I understand why that might be a confusing position for me to take. Let me try explaining this a different way.
If you have a high-resolution display, for example, one of Apple’s “Retina” displays (you appear to have a macOS computer) on a MacBook Pro, your maximum possible screen resolution is somewhere around 220ppi. Depending on what model computer you have.
If you have vector rendering enabled, your linework will be rendered at 220ppi regardless of how much you have zoomed in or out. You will always see, on-screen, vector linework rendered at 220ppi.
If you have raster rendering enabled, the physical dimension of your document becomes more relevant to how the drawing looks on your screen. Now you have rendered your linework at a fixed resolution, at 300ppi (if you have chosen “High” as your display rendering quality). Now, when you dynamically zoom in and out in your LayOut document, you are making each rendered pixel larger or smaller on screen. Any resolution, even 1200ppi (if you could still choose it) will display aliasing if you zoom in enough.
When you print, however, raster rendering resolution isn’t zoom-able any more. Your printer prints at 300ppi at one fixed size; the size of your paper. You could look at the edges with a magnifying glass to simulate the experience of zooming in on the screen, but would likely never be able to optically enlarge the printed image enough to see aliasing. Not at 300ppi, anyway.
SketchUp uses OpenGL for rendering its model viewport. OpenGL is a rasterizer, just like LayOut’s “raster” rendering. That’s why the “raster” rendering in LayOut looks just like it does in SketchUp. Transparency, textures, shadows, and all the other effects. We’re actually using SketchUp’s native rasterization engine, in fact- though we can run it at much higher resolutions in LayOut than you can in SketchUp.
Vector rendering uses a different code path that is only capable of drawing edges at different line weights. There is no vector equivalent of transparency, of shadows or of textures. Instead, the algorithm spends most of its compute time finding and removing hidden edges in the current model view. Just a different way of working.
Hybrid rendering does everything it can as Vector lines (using the vectorization code path) and overlays it on a raster image (using the rasterization code path) for everything else. Unfortunately, since it is actually rendering the same scene twice, it is the most computationally expensive kind of rendering you can do. Looks great when you zoom way in on your screen, though. Practically speaking, it probably won’t look that different when you print.
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I understand that almost all drafting and modeling programs like SketchUp can only really work with one processor to do the primary work, but wouldn’t this be an example of something that parallel processing on two cores would help? I mean, if they truly are two different processes that work independently of the other.
I understand that what @gmashee is after is vector rendering with a line hiding algorithm that doesn’t hide edges that are behind faces with transparency. Would that be possible? (perhaps differentiated by a grey colour or a dashed linetype)
Archicad has a s-l-o-w vector rendering mode (using software, not OpenGL) that can render materials and shadows as vector hatches, and also supports transparency in this way. I don’t know of any other software that can do this. Revit switches to raster rendering if you turn shadows on. Below a screenshot (no transparency in this one) The original is all vector.
I wish I had hair…
Does what you have described cover AK_Sam’s use case, of wanting to zoom in on raster details inside Preview?
Is there a way for users who want to get into trouble, to be able to get back to the arbitrary resolution feature?
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When you double the resolution, you’re actually quadrupling the image size. This really gets out of control fast. Given how much folks express concern about LayOut performance, and given this is the number one reason why performance degrades… I’d really question the value. How often do you really work at resolutions higher than 300ppi, even in Photoshop?
It is geometry kernels that cannot be practically multi-threaded. Rendering is different, and this is a question about rendering. So, yes, it might be possible to run these two rendering operations in parallel threads. I don’t know how practically valuable this particular performance improvement would be without profiling it, though, and would caution against thinking it would be a panacea.
There is always a ‘next’ bottleneck in every system. Some of them are more valuable to tune than others.
I think that raster elements are effectively at 72 dpi, and with antialiasing to make it look nicer on a screen. Zooming to only 2x size in Preview can clearly show the antialiasing. Here’s an image where both display and export were set to High. The right half is the left half at 200%.
One thing I tested was to put the raster scene into a group that was at 50% scale. My hope was that the PDF would include the scene in the 50% scaled container, to then trick it into giving that one item twice the detail, without having to take 4x the area for the whole document. I think it gets flattened out to one resolution, so that idea didn’t last long!
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Yes, this is theoretically possible, though I don’t know how much trouble it would be to implement. People tend to think of rendering in physical/optical terms… but that isn’t really how the algorithms work in code. Vector rendering algorithms spend most of their time doing hidden line removal- testing each edge (or partial edge) to see if it is hidden by something between it and the viewport’s point of view. I don’t know how expensive it is to add another pass to test for (or exclude) edges that are occluded by transparent faces.
The conversion of material, shade and shadow to vector hatching is a real piece of computational magic, and I think ArchiCAD has had this feature for a long time. Possibly longer than it had the ability to do raytraced raster rendering, even. Given ArchiCAD (1982?) is actually older than OpenGL (1992?), I’m not surprised to find they developed their own graphics engine with unique capabilities.
I think it was already there when I first tried it sometime in 1988-9. The material side of it is not so much magic, their material definitions have a slot for a vector hatch to be used to represent it in elevations and such. For someone who wasted a part of his youth struggling with Mecanorma and Letraset zip-a-tone sheets it is certainly magic enough, and those couldn’t be used in perspectives…
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Thanks for all your input and information.
I am sorry if this has gotten a little off-thread-topic to what @AK_SAM originally was referring to. Also if my ramblings have been unclear on what i’m trying to convey.
But i think we have reached a conclusion in that the Open GL display in the Sketchup model viewport is the same way Layout Rasterizes, and displays the same model…though we easily get caught up in the Vector Vs Raster and all the accompanying issues of screen viewing size Vs. 100% paper size, model complexity and file sizes Vs. resolutions etc…
However, I performed the test of setting the LAYOUT zoom to 100%, and trying the (3) different render modes and I can still see a difference from the SKP Open GL to the Raster mode in LO. Yes I have a Retina Screen (@ 216ppi), & yes I have a 300 dpi Laser Printer, but it all seems to boil down to the difference in the way LO renders SKP model even in “raster” mode.
This whole issue for me was if SKP can produce the results of model linework/edges, materials textures etc… all shown through a transparent surface, how come LO couldn’t… UNLESS you ONLY used “raster” mode?
“Vector rendering uses a different code path that is only capable of drawing edges at different line weights. There is no vector equivalent of transparency, of shadows or of textures. Instead, the algorithm spends most of its compute time finding and removing hidden edges in the current model view. Just a different way of working.” - so NOT seeing edges or line work through a glass or transparent surface is actually the intended result when using “Hybrid” mode? Though material textures WILL show up through the same glass / transparent surfaces…(scratching my head on that one)
When you say…"We’re actually using SketchUp’s native rasterization engine, in fact- though we can run it at much higher resolutions in LayOut than you can in SketchUp" that still doesn’t explain why in my case the model view in SKP is better than the LO “raster” view even at 100% zoom with all settings set to HIGH.
Though it might provide a solution to what @AK_SAM was originally seeking with this thread. Though the file size would exponentially increase as a result.
I’d be happy with LO rendering the SAME line quality as we see in Skechtup model viewport…but it seems as close as we can get is “raster” mode in LO with some noticeable degrading of the lines.
I realize one of the beautiful things that drew some of us Graphic Design savvy users to the program back in the day (@Last) was its ease into 3D world. But more than that, was the “Sketchy” illustrative-like style of the renders. I know black lines do not exist in the real world, but Sketchup line art can be a thing of beauty in its own right…when done right. The transparency issue and lines dropping out in Hybrid mode just never made sense to me…but I give up.
Yes, but remember how blocky those looked, before any antialiasing was introduced…
There is one more remark I want to make. When exporting from LayOut to PDF, I recommend anyone to turn off any JPG compression (it is on by default). Keeping it on results in very ugly artifacts that may be a part of what people regard as “pixelation”. SketchUp has often large flat colour surfaces, and those do not suit well for compression algorithms that are designed for photographs.
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This.
I’m so joyously frustrated that I have discovered this!
I have avoided raster because of the
And now I can raster in my workflow 
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