Intro to printing a drawing on Sketchup Pro 2024?

I have been using Sketchup for several years and have always gone to layout to print drawings. I would like to learn how to produce quick drawings from Sketchup. I have looked through a number of posts of people doing the same and troubleshooting the process. I have tried to find the same dialogue boxes to set things up, but don’t know where to look. Is there some kind of tutorial, or process documented somewhere for me to get the basics?

Exactly what kind of drawings are you wanting to do? Generally you’ll get better quality output from LayOut since that’s what its designed for.

I work in a design/build shop that does landscape design for a lot of small, residential properties. We do a very high volume during the busy season, so I need to streamline my process. Exporting my drawing to Layout to do representations of simple installs seems unnecessary. I’d like to be able to crank out a 2D simple render of a house outline and placement of plants, maybe minimal hardscape. I don’t have to provide something scaled. Is that possible? I’d also like to put our company logo and customer info on it.

I have been using Layout for a while and I think it is great. I do my construction documents and permit drawings with it. But with 30 clients on my desk waiting on design drawings, I’d like to eliminate that extra step if I can.

Well, as I wrote, the quality won’t be as high but if you want to do it all in SketchUp, you can add labels and screen text with the Text tool and dimensions with the Dimension Tool. As for adding your logo, that could be done by adding an image of the logo as a watermark. I guess you could add title blocks and schedules as watermark images, too. Create scenes for each required view of the model and then export images or PDFs for each scene. Hard to make that meet the standards of the various agencies that you’re creating the documents for.

A couple of important things to know if you need to make PDF files from your SketchUp model. A PDFexport from SketchUp will be a single page document showing the currently active scene. It’s also a vector output so textures will be replaced with flat colors.

If you have a standardized setup for your documents, a lot of it could be put into a template in LayOut to speed things up and you could create a multi-page PDF that meets the standards for construction documents andpermit drawings.

Yes, I would like to learn a step by step method to do that. I don’t want to spend a lot of time up front on the drawing when I don’t know if the customer is going to put money down for an installation. The other designer uses ProLandscape to do his drawings and they look awful. If the client buys the design, I can always take it to Layout to do the quality drawings I need for permits and such.

And actually for these quick design concepts I would only ever need to print one page.

Then just export a PDF of the desired scene. Or, if you need to show textures, export a JPG or PNG image from SketchUp to send to the client.

I’m sorry. I meant that I wanted to learn a step by step method of doing the pdf in Sketchup. I already have a standardized template set up for Layout.

Set up the view of the model you need. Under File>Export, choose 2D Graphic … and select PDF as the file type. You can set scaling options for the PDF if you have the camera set to Parallel Projection AND a standard view. This might be useful for a plan view if you want. Click on the Options button next to the Export button in the Export window.

I did try that, but I was having similar issues as others. The image didn’t seem to center on the pdf. There was an uneven white margin. I’m not sure how to make it look presentable. I think it may have something to do with setting sizes correctly in certain dialogue boxes which I can’t seem to find. I saw it mentioned in other posts.

Make sure the model is centered in the model window. It might be that you’ll need to change the aspect ratio of the model window to match the aspect ratio of the paper you’re printing on. That dpends on your display and the paper size you are printing to.

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There are no tricks or procedures involved in printing from SketchUp. What gets printed is an image of your model screen, that’s that. To make it presentable use LayOut.

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And here is the mystery. I don’t get that dialogue box when I go to File>Export>2D Graphic. It goes directly to the save screen. If I save, I get an unusable jpeg.

Are you clicking the Options button to the left of Export in the Export window?
pdf

Here’s what I get:

LOL! Nevermind. It showed up when I hit ok.

OP doesn’t want to use LayOut, but I do sometimes 6-7 schematic timber frame designs and 1-2 home or barn designs a week. Sometimes several a day. The key is having a LO and SKP template that are keyed to each other… so you just have to drop a few notes / dimensions and hit export. Whether it is one page or 20 it is fast… almost faster than reading this thread.

I’m not sure I understand what it means for Sketchup and Layout to be keyed together. The way I was taught, and what I typically do, is open my Layout template and use the insert command to put the sketchup view into it. I then have to enlarge the window to fit the layout page. I then use pan/zoom to arrange the image on the page the way I want. I “send to back” to put the sketchup window behind the page border drawn on the page. Is there a faster way to do this part?

I think there is a very good chance I was taught by someone who wasn’t really using the program the way it is supposed to be used. I’m going to do courses over winter to understand better and hopefully be faster for the spring season.

Just for context, I also am a Vectorworks user. I’d like to abandon that in favor of Sketchup for 2D drawing if I can find a way to do it faster.

You can create a SketchUp template with designated scenes to use for the modeling end. Create a proxy SketchUp model (a simple one with basic geometry) using that template and then insert that model into your LayOut template. Set up the viewports as needed on each page. Then instead of opening LayOut and using File>Insert, you open the template in LayOut and in Document Setup>References, relink the SketchUp reference to your project. All of the viewports will update to show the new project.

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Ok, I will definitely spend some time with this. Thank you!