Hi Guys, I have been using Sketchup for some time I would probably consider myself to be a Sketchup Ninja. I did learn something today that I did not know and it is very helpful when you require a great quality image yet do not want to get it photorealistic rendered.
I am pretty sure most here use Layout for their 2D drawings and most probably did not know that you can take a screenshot of a model and simply copy and past into Layout? even if you don’t use layout you can use this image to blow up and print on a billboard or a poster.
Why would you do this? I do this when I am adding detail or Vignettes to my drawings in 3D perspective view, I do not see the point in using a scene as you shouldn’t really be dimensioning perspective 3D views in Layout as it’s simply bad practice. Sure you could create a scene and then associate the scene inside layout yet I really do not see the point, ideally, you keep Layout working as efficiently as possible and an image is about as efficient as you can get.
Anyway, so what did I learn today that has relevance to reducing lag in Layout? Okay, when doing a screenshot from your screen the screenshot will only be the resolution of the screen you have and in many cases, you would want a crisp clean image that is higher than screen resolution. So here is the best way to get a high res image from Sketchup.
1 Navigate to the location in your model where you want to take a screenshot.
2 Go to the File menu and select export 2D graphic
3. In the drop-down at the bottom of the page select “PNG” as the file type and then select the options tab
4 Inside the options tab deselect “use View size” and select “transparent background” (note you can go huge so only go as big as you need, the larger the image the larger the file size and slower Layout will work)
5 export the image to a folder location
6 when inside layout import the image
I am not sure if this also works on Mac, I assume it would