Chapter 12
IN THIS CHAPTER
Printing views of your model
Figuring out the printing dialog boxes
Printing to scale
Uploading a model to the 3D Warehouse
You live at a time in history when it is often necessary to inscribe an image of your design onto dried and bleached wood pulp, and then, in a few seconds, send that same design, in the form of ones and zeros, thousands of miles to a series of data centers, where it’s available in its entirety to anyone with an Internet connection.
Printing on paper and uploading to the cloud may seem like diametric opposites, but they’re really just points on the same continuum of sharing.
In the first part of this chapter, you learn how to print views of your SketchUp model. Because the Windows and Mac versions of this procedure are so different, each operating system has its own section.
The second part of this chapter is dedicated to the SketchUp 3D Warehouse. It's a giant online repository of models made (mostly) by everyday SketchUp modelers. Uploading your own creations to the 3D Warehouse is useful for sharing and archiving your work.
As much as everyone likes to pretend that we live in an all-digital world, the truth is that we don’t. Some clients simply prefer looking at printouts. Aidan loves having a printout to stick to the wall. Rebecca likes to brainstorm and sketch out potential changes on a printout, as a way of developing a roadmap for the changes she really wants to make before further changing a digital file.
Printing from SketchUp is easy, as long as you’re not trying to do anything too complicated. By complicated, we mean printing to a particular scale, which can be a harrowing experience the first couple times you attempt it. Fortunately, printing to scale is something most people almost never have to do, so we save the instructions for how to do it for the end of this section.
Most of the time, all you need to do is print exactly what you see on your screen. Follow these steps to do that:
Make sure that the view you want to print appears in your modeling window.
Unless you’re printing to scale, SketchUp prints exactly what you see in your modeling window.
Choose File ⇒ Print Setup.
The Print Setup dialog box opens, which is where you choose what printer and paper you want to use.
Choose File ⇒ Print Preview.
The Print Preview dialog box opens. Print Preview lets you see an image of what your print will look like before you send it to a printer. Lots of trees thank you for saving paper by using Print Preview every time you print.
In the Print Preview dialog box, do the following:
In the Tabbed Scene Print Range area, choose which scenes you want to print, if you have more than one.
If you need to, you can read all about scenes in Chapter 11.
Choose a print quality for your printout.
We recommend High Definition for most jobs.
For a complete description of all the knobs and doohickeys in the Print Preview and Print dialog boxes, have a look at the next section in this chapter.
Click OK.
The Print Preview dialog box closes, and you get an on-screen preview of what your print will look like.
If you like what you see, click the Print button in the upper-left corner of the Print Preview window to open the Print dialog box.
If you don’t like what you’re about to print, click the Close button (at the top of the screen) and go back to Step 1.
In the Print dialog box (which should look exactly like the Print Preview dialog box), click OK.
Your print job goes to the printer.
Three cheers for simplicity! The Print Preview and Print dialog boxes in SketchUp are exactly the same. Figure 12-2 shows the former because that’s the one we advocate using first every time, but the descriptions in this section apply to both.
If you used the Print Setup dialog box first, you shouldn’t need to change the settings in this section. If you want, from the drop-down list, you can choose which printer to use. If you know something about printers, you can even click the Properties button to make adjustments to your printer settings. (Because settings are different for every printer on Earth, that’s between you and your printer’s user manual.)
Use this area to tell SketchUp which of your scenes you want to print, if you have more than one. This option is really handy for quickly printing all your scenes. Select the Current View option to print only whatever’s currently in your modeling window.
This one’s pretty basic: Choose how many copies of each view you want to print. If you’re printing multiple copies of multiple scenes, select the Collate check box to print packets, which can save you from assembling them yourself. Here’s what happens when you print three copies of four scenes:
This is, by far, the most complicated part of this dialog box; Print Size controls how your model will look on the printed page. Figure 12-3 shows the effect of some of these settings on a final print.
The Print Size controls are as follows:
Page Size: As long as you don’t have the Fit to Page check box selected, you can manually enter a page size using these controls. If you type a width or height, SketchUp figures out the other dimension and pretends it’s printing on a different-sized piece of paper.
The Page Size option is especially useful if you want to make a big print by tiling together lots of smaller pages. See the next section in this chapter, “Tiled Sheet Print Range,” for more details.
Scale: Here’s where printing gets a little complicated. To print to scale, you must do two things before you go anywhere near the Print or Print Preview dialog boxes:
Take a look at the section “Printing to scale (Windows and Mac),” later in this chapter, for a complete rundown on printing to scale in SketchUp.
Perhaps you’re printing at a scale that won’t fit on a single page, or you’ve entered a print size that’s bigger than the paper size you chose in the Print Setup dialog box. The Tiled Sheet Print Range area lets you print your image on multiple sheets and then attach them together later. You can get posters from your small-format printer!
To be honest, selecting a print quality for your image involves a little trial and error. What you get with each setting depends a lot on your model, so try a couple different settings if you have time.
You can control the following odds-and-ends settings in the Print Preview dialog box, too:
Use High Accuracy HLR: The bad news is that we have no idea what HLR stands for. The good news is that it doesn’t really matter. Selecting this check box tells SketchUp to send vector information to the printer instead of the usual raster data. (Check out Chapter 14 for a description of what these terms mean.) Why should you care? Vector lines look much smoother and cleaner when printed, so your whole model will look better — with one condition: Gradients (those nice, smooth shadows on rounded surfaces) don’t print well as vectors. If you have a lot of rounded or curvy surfaces in your model view, you probably don’t want to choose this option. Try to print both ways and choose the one that looks better. Thank goodness for Print Preview, huh?
If your model view includes a Sketchy Edges style, don’t use high accuracy HLR; you won’t see any of the nice, sketchy effects in your final print.
If you’re using a Mac, the printing story is a little simpler than it is for folks who use Windows computers — but only by a little. The first part of the following sections lays out a procedure for generating a simple, straightforward print of what you see in your modeling window.
The second part can be called “Gross anatomy of the Mac dialog boxes.” In these sections, we explain what each and every setting does.
Follow these steps to print exactly what you see in your modeling window on a Mac:
Make sure that your modeling window contains whatever you want to print.
SketchUp prints exactly what you see in your modeling window, unless of course you’re printing to scale. Because printing to scale is complicated, the topic has its own section later in this chapter.
Choose File ⇒ Page Setup.
The Page Setup dialog box opens, where you decide what printer and paper size to use.
Choose an orientation for your print.
Landscape is the most common choice, because SketchUp's modeling window is usually wider than it is tall.
Choose File ⇒ Document Setup.
The Document Setup dialog box opens.
In the Document Setup dialog box, make sure that the Fit View to Page check box is selected.
Check out the next section in this chapter for a full description of what everything does.
Choose File ⇒ Print to open the Print dialog box.
In the Print dialog box, you see an on-screen preview of what your print will look like on paper.
If the preview suits you, click the Print button to send your print job to the printer.
If you’re not happy with the preview, click the Cancel button and start again at Step 1. Isn’t printing fun?
You use the settings in the Document Setup dialog box shown in Figure 12-6 to control how big your model prints. Here’s what everything does:
Width and Height: If the Fit View to Page check box is deselected, you can type either a width or a height for your final print. This is the way to go if you want to print a tiled poster out of several sheets of paper; just enter a final size, and you’ll have a poster in no time flat.
The Print dialog box on the Mac is something of a many-headed beast; several panels are hidden underneath the SketchUp drop-down list. Luckily, you don't need to adjust those options unless you're managing color or other printing technicalities that are beyond the scope of this book. The options on the SketchUp panel, shown in Figure 12-7, are described in the following list:
Vector Printing: When you select this check box, SketchUp sends vector (instead of raster) information to the printer. Have a look at Chapter 14 for a description of these terms.
The upshot here is that vector printing makes edges look much smoother and cleaner but does a lousy job on gradients (the shadows on your curved surfaces). Use vector printing if your model view is made up of mostly flat faces, but try printing both ways (with vector printing on and off) to see which looks better.
If your model view includes a Sketchy Edges style, don’t select Vector Printing; you won’t see any of the nice, sketchy effects in your final print.
Here’s where printing gets interesting. Sometimes, instead of printing exactly what you see on your screen so that it fits on a sheet of paper, you may need to print a drawing to scale. See the nearby sidebar “Wrapping your head around scale” for more information about drawing to scale.
Before you can print a view of your model to a particular scale, you have to set up things properly. Keep the following points in mind:
The steps in this section allow you to produce a scaled print from SketchUp. The Windows instructions appear first and then Mac details. When the user-interface elements are different for the two platforms, the ones for Mac are shown in parentheses. Figure 12-8 shows the relevant dialog boxes for printing to scale in Windows and on a Mac.
Windows: Make sure that the Use Model Extents check box is clear.
Mac users don’t have this option.
Enter the scale at which you want to print your model view.
If you want to print a drawing at ¼ -inch scale, enter the following:
If you want to produce a print at 1:100 scale, enter the following:
Take note of how may pages you’ll need to print your drawing.
If you’re using Windows, you can check this in the Tiled Sheet Print Range area of the dialog box. On a Mac, the number of pages you’ll need appears in the Pages Required section of the Document Setup dialog box. If you want to print on a different-sized piece of paper, change the setting in the Print Setup (Page Setup) dialog box.
If you want to print your drawing on a single sheet and it won’t fit, use a smaller scale.
Using the ¼ inch = 1 foot example, try shrinking the drawing to inch = 1 foot scale. To do this, enter the following:
See this chapter’s earlier “Making a basic print” section (for your operating system) for the whole story on basic printing from SketchUp.
The 3D Warehouse is a huge online collection of 3D models that is searchable and, most importantly, free for everyone to use. To access the 3D Warehouse, all you need is an Internet connection. If you have a SketchUp model that you want to share with the world, share with just a few people, or store on SketchUp’s servers for safekeeping, the 3D Warehouse is where you put it.
With that understanding, here are some awesome reasons to use the 3D Warehouse:
Create your own personal component library. Because SketchUp can download models directly from the 3D Warehouse into the model you’re working on, making your own online collections is incredibly handy. Everything you upload is accessible anywhere you happen to be working.
For example, you can maintain a collection of the furniture in your house. Whenever you need a model of your sofa, you can just download it — no matter what computer you're using.
You can get to the 3D Warehouse in two ways:
From the web: Browse to https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com
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Accessing the 3D Warehouse from the web is a great way to hunt for 3D models without opening SketchUp first.
Go ahead and poke around the 3D Warehouse. It’s amazing what you find; thousands of people add new content every day. Much of it isn’t very useful, but you still find plenty of interesting things to download and look at.
Refer to Chapter 5 for plenty of information about grabbing what you need from the 3D Warehouse.
Follow these steps to upload your model to the 3D Warehouse:
Open the model you want to upload in SketchUp and fiddle around with your view until you like what you see.
When you upload a model to the 3D Warehouse, SketchUp automatically creates a preview image that’s a snapshot of your modeling window.
Choose File ⇒ 3D Warehouse ⇒ Share Model.
A mini-browser window opens, and it shows the logon screen for the 3D Warehouse. If you want to upload models, you need a Trimble ID or a Google account. Both types of accounts are free; you just need a valid e-mail address to get one. If you don’t already have one, follow the on-screen instructions to sign up.
Click the Upload button to add your model to the 3D Warehouse.
If everything works properly, you see a page with your model on it, along with all the information you just entered. Congratulations — you’re now a full-fledged member of the SketchUp universe.
It takes a while for the 3D Warehouse’s robots (its backend, in geek parlance) to process your model after you upload it. You won’t be able to search for it, see it in your collections, or even preview it in 3D for a few minutes. But that’s okay — just sit back and reflect on what your great-grandfather would say if he heard you complaining. He did have to walk 50 miles to school, after all.
The 3D Warehouse isn’t a free-for-all of individual models floating around in cyberspace. It’s actually a pretty organized place. Take a look at any model’s individual details page to see what’s possible. Figure 12-9 is a screenshot of Aidan's couch in the 3D Warehouse, taken in March 2014 (it may look slightly different by the time you read this).
Here’s a list of the less-obvious doodads and gadgets on the 3D Warehouse that you'll want to know about:
Viewer settings: These three icons let you choose between static images, a 3D view, and a chart that shows the model’s popularity (views and downloads) over time.
Of the three views, 3D view (the middle icon) is the most revolutionary. Being able to orbit around a model without having to download it first will save you tons of time and energy.
Embed: Click here and the 3D Warehouse serves up some HTML code that you can use to embed the model on a web page.
The Embed feature is especially important for product manufacturers, designers, and anyone else who wants to let the public explore a model in 3D without leaving his or her website.
While we're on the subject of collections, here’s how to create your own:
Make sure you’re logged in to the 3D Warehouse.
If you're logged in, you’ll see your username on the account drop-down menu at the top of every page in the Warehouse. If you’re not logged in, click Sign In (also at the top of every page) and put in your account credentials.
Choose Create Collection from the Account drop-down menu at the top of any page.
You can create a collection in a couple of other ways, but this is the most universal one; it works no matter where you are in the 3D Warehouse.
Choose a Privacy setting for your new collection.
Public means everyone on the Warehouse can see it. Private means only you can see it, and only when you’re logged in.
Write a brief but meaningful description of what your collection will contain.
Keep in mind that collections can contain both models and other collections.
Type in tags that might help others find your collection.
Tagging is especially relevant for collections marked Public.