hi all, i have spent the last 2 or 3 years teaching myself how to use sketchup as a 2d and 3d drawing tool. i’m no expert, but i can do enough to get by and honestly i’m quite proud of what i learned especially given my age and with no prior experience in the field of program drawing. ( thanks everyone who posted on youtube).
over the course of the last year, i have been drawing a Boeing B17 F cut away, with individual parts that form a whole fuselage. with a view to building a 1~16th miniature in full detail. its a huge project, still very much in progress, but its looking pretty good. as far as it goes.
now i need to start printing some of the parts off onto paper, ready for the build proper . PROBLEM, in the correct scale a circle of140mm diam comes out on 2 sheets of A4 and in facets. last week it wanted to print it on 735 sheets of a4 . ( REALLY) … i have changed the setting many times and surfed the net to find a solution to this problem but cant find one. meanwhile, frustration is setting in, stress levels rising and temples are pulsing. at times, i’ve been so fed up with it, that i’ve nearly deleted it all .
its frustrating, because Its a printing program. printing stuff is old hat, the tech has been around for decades now. so why is it so hard to achieve here. all i want is a 2d drawing (plan) of a circle 140mm diam on 1 page of A4. wont happen…
its crazy and frustrating, to think that it cant be done simply. and its putting me off moving forward with my project. as well as affecting any possibility of me buying pro. if this is how sketchup is going to be in the future., please tell me now. and ill find something else to do. maybe using pencil and paper and old school, tech drawing, because i know that it still works.
This is what LayOut is for.
It is possible, though to print to scale in Make but you have to adjust the size of the drawing window to match the aspect ratio of the paper (or at least get it close) and use Zoom Extents on the model so it fills the drawing window as much as possible.
By the way, please update your profile with the real graphics card you are using.
dont know what that is
LayOut? It’s part of the SketchUp Pro package. It’s the the tool to use for making things like plans, condocs, and other documentation from the SketchUp model.
ok , so i need pro to download layout. or can i get it separately.
also can i print my current plans from there. or do i have to draw
them all again in layout. ( sorry for poor punctuation, i’m on a
scandinavian keyboard and its totally different to ours)
You are typing the same way my wife talks so I can understand you. 
(She’s Norwegian)
You would need to download and install SketchUp Pro to get LayOut.
The process in a nutshell is to create scenes in SketchUp which show the views you need in your plan. then send the SketchUp file to LayOut and use the scenes as viewports. You can set the scale as needed as well as the paper size so that you can print the frames on a single sheet or possibly multiple views on a sheet. Add dimensions and other text if you wish and then export a PDF file which you can then print at full size. If you need to use larger paper than you can print, you can send the PDF file to an office supply place or someone else with a large format printer.
It IS possible to print to scale, on one page, from Make directly. And you probably don’t want to spend $700 on the Pro version, which is the only way to get Layout other than the 30 day Pro trial.
But printing direct from Make is not one of SketchUp’s strengths, to say the least, though it can be done.
The full steps are here from memory, though you will find that they are posted elsewhere in the forum - search the SU section for ‘make print to scale’) :
Select Camera/Parallel Projection (you can’t print to scale from Perspective view).
Choose a standard view - Top, Front or Side as needed.
Adjust the proportions of the whole SU Window (not just the model window area) to be close to the same proportions as the paper you want to print on, usually Landscape with the long axis across the screen and page. Hide the Default Tray (SU 2016 or later) so the model has more room to fill the screen.
If you want to see all the model to scale, Zoom Extents. Otherwise, adjust the Zoom and viewpoint (with the [H]and tool ) to show just what you want to include in the printout.
Open the File/Print Setup and make sure you have the right page orientation selected (Portrait or Landscape), and the correct printer and printer properties selected. OK that.
To save paper, and while experimenting, choose to print to PDF if you have that option - if not, there are free Windows Print to PDF programs available for download. (And if you ARE printing to PDF, make sure that you don’t have a ‘fit to page’ checkbox ticked, and/or that you are printing at 100% scale - especially if you have printed successfully to PDF then you want to print THAT out to scale on paper.)
Open the File/Print dialogue.
Uncheck Fit to page. Uncheck Use Model Extents.
Choose Print Quality - the default, Draft, is very crude and blocky, so go for one of the higher qualities.
I usually leave Use High Accuracy HLR unchecked - if checked, guidelines won’t print.
You can experiment in a new model, by drawing a rectangle a little smaller than the print area of your printer - for example, try 270 x 170mm for A4, or 10x7.5" on US Letter.
Set the scale you want. In your example, probably 1:1, or whatever makes sense for what you are printing.
You won’t get all the way to the print margins without a lot of fiddling.
When you have it working, set a Scene and Update it, so you can go back to that. But without a plugin (I think there is one, but haven’t used it) you can’t save the window size.
Hope that helps - it’s a common problem, and I still have to fiddle to fit all of what I want from a stage plan onto one sheet of A4.
Best of luck.
is she now .thats funny, so is mine, Norsk women er veldig fine.
Anyway, thanks for that, i’m a bit more encouraged now , to be honest i
don’t quite get it. but i guess i’m going to have to play with it for a
while before it makes more sense. i am however considering changing my
username from losingthewilltolive to livinginwithsomehope. i guess the
real question now is how much better is pro than its free brother. and is
it worth the money.
det er sant
I think pro is worth the money but then I use LayOut with most projects I draw in SketchUp and wouldn’t want to do without it.
i did manage it once before, and all the measurements worked fine.
but no more . i can get it to scale but not on 1 page. i think i
have to reduce the box around the image . but i dont know how . ive been
trying for nearly a week now, so im a little ticked off. but ill go
over it again and see.
Are you dragging the edges of the Sketchup window?
There are few things in SKETCHUP ITSELF that can’t be done in Make vs. Pro, including making Dynamic Components. The Solid Tools in SU Pro make life easier, but Intersect Faces will do most of the same things, but with more manual editing afterwards. Other differences are listed on the main SU website. Make canNOT be used for commercial purposes - that’s different, and important for some users.
The BIG difference is that only Pro has Layout for preparing Construction Documents from Sketchup models. Printing is much easier, and dimensioning and annotations are much more versatile.