Why does the sketchup team don’t make an option to set different line-weights and line-types on different lines in sketchup?
I know I can do it with layout, but it would be very useful if I could visualize it by drawing on sketchup.
I know only one plugin that does something similar. (2D tools) It creates a parallel line to the segments you chose, and then it fills it black. Problem is that you can’t visualize it in 3D. And also in some cases by selecting complex segments, it spends a lot of time to do it…
So I would know if there is already a solution to do that?
And also interesting is why does sketchup don’t have this option?
Thank you all.
Greetings from canary!
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A superb suggestion.
-Gully
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Was wondering this myself.
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Edges in SketchUp have always been there to define the outlines of faces. Lineweight is generally a 2D display thing. You can control line weight for SketchUp viewports in LayOut, though.
Thanks Dave.
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Looks like there still isn’t any way to do this in Sketchup? Would love this feature…
At this point I’d guess there never will be a way to do this in SketchUp. It can be done easily enough in LayOut.
I think the response from the developers in the past has been that line weight is an annotation feature, not a structural feature. SketchUp deals with the structure (aka geometry) of a model, LayOut with presentation including annotation.
BTW, please don’t argue with me, I’m just stating what I remember from the responses when this request has been raised in the past not expressing an opinion.
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…a kind of: Apply Dashed Lines to Tags
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If only I could add that to my professional email signature 
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I thought perhaps instead of 11 different types of dashed lines, maybe we could use some lines of different weight. It seems obvious to me.
Drafting standards specify that line weights in drawings are used in determined ways:
-Thin lines are used to indicate divisions on surfaces, hatches and annotations
-Medium lines are used to depict changes in level as seen by the viewer
-Thick lines delineate edges of features that are shown as cut by a section or floorplan
The division in SketchUp to edges, profiles and section cut edges replicates this quite perfectly, and all these width can be set in Style settings. The same standards say that the line widths in a drawing should be limited to three, with medium lines always double as thick as the thin ones, and the widest, again, double the weight of the medium ones. If meaning is loaded into line weights in between, the human eyes are prone to get confused.
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But only if we are talking about a 2D paper space drawing program.
SketchUp is not a drawing program, it is a modeler in 3D model space. It has edges, not lines (other than guidelines, aka construction lines.)
Edges themselves do not have a thickness. They are actually infinitely small. If the style has show edges on, then a thin pixel line will be shown along the edge. As you zoom in this display line stays the same because again edges do not have thickness. They are just the boundary between face planes.
As has been said above, if you need to draw lines then do so in LayOut’s paper space. Once you stop thinking of SketchUp as a place to draw or a CAD-like program … (ie, it was purposefully designed to not be like CAD, and has been called “the UN-CAD”,) … then it becomes obvious that LayOut is the place to draw and not SketchUp.
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Design, not drafting:
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It could be possible if we could assign styles by object differently for each scene, instead of globally for all objects in a scene. The combination of styles by object would allow anything to happen and changing them in each scene would allow a design tool and a presentation tool to become much more powerful as presentation tool.
On layout it is possible to assign different styles to the sketchup tags, I think this feature was added with the 2022 release, for me its more useful to have this feature on layout than on sketchup, layout is the program designed to create 2D drafts with different line weights to represent architecture properly, on sketchup, lines just represent edges of a 3D model, it would be a bit confusing to have a possibility to assign different line weights directly on the 3D model.
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I’ve never had much luck with it in Layout. Do you have advice on how to have different line-weights in a complex drawing? The primary issue is that where two edges meet on the same vertical plane, the draw order is arbitrary (so sometimes a thick line gets obscured by a thin line—defying both gravity and physics). I either have to trace over everything in Layout, explode the model viewport, stack viewports (which is cumbersome or can crash the computer if auto-render is enabled), or set everything to the same line weight. I’ve seen this topic discussed for many years now, but I am hoping there is some way around it.
It is simple, assuming that by “drawing” you mean a 3D model. If you create only 2D drawings I would advise you to look for some other software. An example is the standard line weight distribution in an architectural drawing:
- Thin lines represent divisions occurring on a surface or folds where both adjacent surfaces are visible
- Medium lines represent edges that delineate a step in space, like stair steps or the edge of a countertop
- Thick lines represent objects that are cut by the plan or section drawing.
You get standard ISO line weights by setting your style in SketchUp to use 1 for edges, 2 for profiles and 4 for section cut edges. Then in LayOut you set the line weight for the viewport to the desired width of the thinnest lines.
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Yes, representing a 3D model in a 2D viewport in Layout. I appreciate your response, and I should have phrased my original question better. I’ll move this discussion over to: Tag Stacking Order (In lieu of Arranging) - #8 by izaacpost
I am always a fan for given users more options to 3D Model/2D Draft the way they like and am not one to subscribe that there is only one way to do things, and although I would welcome more user control with line weights similar to how dashed lines have been enabled in SU, the suggestion Anssi makes is a good one. I recently gave up on Vector and Hybrid in LO and spent the time to adjust my styles to get good results with Raster.
These are the settings I use:
Profiles = 2 (Helps pronounce edges as thicker, lines within a plane tend to show thinner)
Depth = 4 (Line closer to the camera are thicker, those that are farther are thinner)
Section Lines = 4 (very thick line at section cuts)
Set Fog for each scene to fade line work in the distance.
Set Shadows to help communicate forms.
Note: Use Fog and Shadows with caution if you have an older computer.
Here is how that looks in SU on a 3440x1440 screen
In LO I set the SU Viewport Line Scales to 0.20
Here is an example PDF output in Layout.
house-test.pdf (673.3 KB)
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