I am new to this and have dabbled on and off with SketchUp Make. I learned from Make to Illustrator CC on a PC does not come in clean and graphics like circles come in jagged and gradients are not smooth, but broken in sections of shadings. I am looking to make an investment in Pro because I heard that it has export capability to Illustrator (.eps) - how do the graphics appear and does it come in clean showing clean gradiations and no breaks? I need to know if this really works otherwise it serves no other use if it cannot be used in Illustrator. I would love to see examples that are posted so I can see for myself if this really works or not. Once I know that answer, then I can move forward with setting up training in SketchUp Pro. I greatly appreciate your time, thank you!
Hello! You can export DWG for Illustrator but it doesn’t export faces, so you have to use the Live Paint in Illustrator to manually rebuild shapes (which also automatically joins broken edges). EPS export supports faces but you won’t get true curves. If I have to smooth contours, I normally use the “Simplify” command in Illustrator.
You can see the difference here. The left one is the raw geometry imported from SketchUp and modified with the Live Paint tool. You can see the curve is not smooth. The right one is the same geometry but its curves are simplified.
Thank you for your response and showing it visually. I am experimenting with an .eps file I converted from a PDF from Make because export options are so limited. I see where you are coming from using the simplify which is great, but if there are gradients like what I’ve attached, how best could this be resolved for the image to be crisp, clean to use in Illustrator? Or would it be easiest to just create the 3-D line drawing and then save as an .eps and then start filling in with gradients in Illustrator? Just feeling out options on how best to be able to do something like this and if SketchUp is the right program for dealing with this sort of compatibility.
In content, an EPS or a PDF file exported from SketchUp Pro are identical pure vector files with image textures and shadows not supported (in terms of file formats, PDF is a compressed EPS file, more than less). From SketchUp Make, again, in practical terms identical export can be achieved by printing to a PDF printer with the “Use high-accuracy HLR”(PC) or “Vector printing” (MAC) print option enabled.
To a degree you can make your gradients look smoother by using more segments to your circles and arcs, but the export will still comprise a series of flat colour swatches instead of a continuous gradient.
SketchUp Pro users can achieve a sort of compromise output by exporting to PDF from the LayOut application with the “Hybrid rendering” option. Then the faces will be rendered as bitmap images and lines as vector lines on top of that.
Anssi
This may be a little out of context but after looking at your graphic, I thought I would point out that you can change the number of segments that make up arcs and circles. Also, your graphic does not display smoothed normals and therefore you can still see the facets that make up the cylinder surface.
The graphic below displays mockups of your model with 3 different segment levels. It also shows the surfaces fully smoothed. Again, I dont know if this information influences your workflow to Illustrator but since you are working in SketchUp, I thought I would point these options out to you.
Cheers
CD