Hi there,
Have searched high and low for a solution to this problem but no joy yet.
I am running Sketchup 8 on Mac OS 10.6.8.
Whenever I import a PDF, JPEG or TIFF as an image (say, in order to trace or mark up an existing 2D ground plan), the image becomes blurry/fuzzy, as if it has been enlarged too much. It doesn’t seem to matter what scale I set it at or what size the image file is.
I have tried fiddling with the OpenGL settings with no change.
The exercise I am attempting is very simple, to annotate an existing set of ground plans with measurements and labels, which I know is a basic thing to use Sketchup for but I’ve no simpler option at the moment.
Any advice or explanations are most welcome. Thanks!
When you import a large image, SketchUp will downsample it so that its largest dimension will be 1024 pixels. If you check the “Use maximum texture size” box in Window menu>Preferences>OpenGL (might be a different menu on the Mac), this is usually doubled. The only solution to getting the image in at full resolution is to pre-split it into 1024x1024 (or 2048x2048) chunks in an image editor, importing those one by one and placing them side by side into SketchUp.
The PC version of SketchUp doesn’t support importing PDF files, so I don’t know exactly what is happening here. Possibly your original PDF, if it contains, as you describe, annotated ground plans, is a resolution-independent vector image and the image size you quote is what SketchUp converts it into. Or is it the original paper size in millimeters?
To get a decent print of a black-and white architectural drawing in raster form it should be at least 150-200 dots per inch, that is about 1250 x 1750 pixels for an A4 page.