I am a student using sketchup as a modelling software and was wondering if anyone knew of a good plug-in for producing line drawings. I use vray at the moment for any photorealistic renders I want to make but would like to produce more fine line drawings alongside that. Some of my classmates have been using rhino* and the line drawings with that software are really nice and clean, much moreso than I’ve found with sketchup layout produced drawings. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
*(I’ve tried converting my sketchup file to rhino for drawing production, but the file tends to slow and crash quite easily because of the meshes in the file, and regardless I’d love to keep the modelling within sketchup at this stage)
What version of SketchUp are you actually using? Your profile is confusing.
It’s entirely possible to create very sharp line art with LayOut. LayOut is not available with an free version of SketchUp though.
Share your SketchUp file so we can see what you are working with and show us an image of the sort of thing you want to accomplish. And fix your forum profile so we can give you good guidance.
What sort of line drawings are you thinking of. You can make image exports from SketchUp that are just line art if that’s what you want. No extensions required.
Your profile says you’re using the free version but you say you’re using Vray which can be used only on desktop versions of sketchup.
I’m an architect and I make all the documentation using sketchup and layout. I’ve been doing this for almost 10 years, and I get better results than with Autocad.
I’ll attach a pdf of a project I worked on a few weeks ago. Planos Ampliacion y Modificación Profermaco.pdf (3.3 MB)
Hi Dave, thanks for the reply! I’ve updated my info properly, made the account in a rush so skipped over a few bits of info - my bad! I am using Sketchup Studio 2022 so do have access to LayOut.
I’ve attached jpegs of reference drawings which have been post-edited in photoshop of course but the original line weights and meshes are shown and have a thread-like appearance that I have never been able to achieve through sketchup - I’m looking for a way to produce vector lines at high quality for A0 size printing. So far from what I can see LayOut’s line weights are heavier than hairline options in other programmes and template sheet sizes tend to just go to A1, am I correct in this? Thank you again for your response!
Hi Francis, thanks for your reply - I’ve amended my profile now, wasn’t correct thanks for pointing it out! Thank you also for sending on those example drawings, they look great. What line weight would you be setting those drawings to? Thanks again.
There are different line widths and colors, black and three different grays, the thinnest line width used is 0.1 which is the smallest available and the thickest is 3.5, from sketchup 2022 you can set the line weights, colors and styles for every tag on the sketchup model, it’s a very useful feature added.
You can use sketchup styles, create your own style or use a plugin to create images like the one you posted, I’ve used a plugin called sketchfx that lets you create cool artistic renders with very few clicks.
