Hey guys, it's Aaron. I was playing around with SketchUp and LayOut,
as people do. I came up with this fun way to use the different ways of showing a SketchUp model
in LayOut along with some functions of styles to create a unique composite image inside of LayOut,
with no photo-shopping. A lot of people use photoshop to create different layers and
composite them together. You can do all of it in LayOut. If you clicked on the thumbnail, you
already know what this is going to end up looking like, but here as I'm recording it, I haven't done
it yet. So, let's take this car right here and make a new image using just SketchUp and LayOut.
This is a car I just pulled down from 3D Warehouse. I liked it because it had these
nice lines and a bright color. What I want to do is get one of those composite images you see
where the color fades into absolute white and see-through at the back, but where the
lines stay over top of it. So, I want to create a composite look like that, but I want to do it
with just SketchUp and LayOut. I want to do it in as few steps, or pieces, as possible too.
I'm going to do a little bit of prep here in SketchUp. I like
this view. I like the view I'm looking at it from. I'm going to come over to Styles
and I'm going to turn the sky off and change my background color to straight-up white. That is what I want to see. That is perfect
so far. The other thing I want to do is get that fade in here. I'm going to use fog to do this.
Now, fog is limited compared to a gradient fade or a gradient mask I could put on
in something like photoshop because it is a 3D linear fade that is straight away from the camera. So, I don't have
the ability to bring the fade across this way. It is always dependent on where the camera is. But,
with this three-quarter view, I can do a pretty good job with the dials here of saying,
"Bring it up so it fades all the way out in the back, but keep the front fade back far enough
so I have nice clear colors and crisp lines on the closest corner. I'm going to get this just
like that. I am going to lose that back- tire and back-end, but I want to keep clear,
crystal clear, colors right up here in the front. Do something like that. There we go!
That's looking right. Now, just to be on the safe side. I'm going to go in here
and I'm going to add a Scene and I'll leave it called Scene 1. I just want to make sure that
if I do come in and play with this at all, I can always revert back to it. My scene,
as it is saved right now, saves a lot of stuff that I just set up. It saves the Style; so it
has that background in white. It saves the fog set up that I have here. It saves the camera location.
Even if I hop into LayOut and I just use the current view, that's fine. Knowing I have a
scene to jump back to, if I need to, is good. I use scenes a lot where I don't actually intend to
use them for a final output in any way. By having it as a Scene, it is having peace of mind knowing
I can jump back to this view if I had to. Plus, unless I am looking at hundreds of scenes, adding
a scene doesn't cost anything as far as the model goes. I'm going to go ahead and Save this model
and take it right into LayOut. I'll hit Send to LayOut, LayOut is going to pop-up.
Let's use a landscape drawing, that's fine. There we go! There's our model.
It looks good. We've done a couple of videos, especially recently, talking about stacking
viewports, that kind of thing. Stacking viewports is awesome because it does give you your line work
separate from your fill-behind, and you have a little more flexibility. I'm going to do as
much as I can with just this single viewport. I'm going to keep this one and make it a little
bit bigger. I'm going to really use this page. I have a lot of white around the drawing, but
that's good. That fills up the page pretty well. I'm going to do a couple of steps here is all.
One is, I'm going to come over here and change my rendering style. Right now, it's set to Raster,
which is my default in LayOut. Raster is basically a bitmap drawing. It is drawing
all of these colors. That's perfect. If I were to switch it to Vector, look what would happen here.
Vector is just lines and surfaces, basically a flat render of the entire model. All of my pieces
show up. Something I lose in Vector is fog. A Vector drawing does not include something like
Fog. So, that's not going to work either. If I flip over to Hybrid, though, this is pretty cool
because what Hybrid does is takes the imagery, or the colors, from the Raster image and lays them
underneath the lines from the Vector. This is getting closer to what I want to see. Remember when I was
talking about that fade from full-color out to white, but keeping those outlines?
I like this, it looks okay, but I might want to go a little bit further. There are two things I want
to add. One, is I do want to include my shadow. If I turn on Shadows right now - this is nice because
Shadows will actually come on as a part of Hybrid. With Vector they won't show up, but in Hybrid,
this actually shows up, and my shadow disappears into Fog as well. That's pretty cool. That's
exactly what I had envisioned in my mind, was that it would trail off like that. If I had that hard
shadow all the way around, it would ruin the effect of this disappearing. That looks pretty
good, but there's one more thing I want to add here. I don't dislike this, I think it looks okay,
but when I get back here, that black line is a little bit too harsh. I could play with line
weights if I wanted to. I could select it and I could change my line weights here to
a lighter or a heavier pen. That would give me more or less dark lines back here. Obviously,
I like the way it looks up here [in the front]. I like the lines on top, nice hard lines. What I am going to do so
it kind of looks like it fades off - I can't put a fade onto line work, not in Vector. We just
discovered that. What I can do is take these lines and have them not be so hard of a black.
I can do that using tags. If I come over here, everything is on the same layer.
I have one group in this car, it is on the untagged layer. I didn't put it into a named tag.
If I click on Default for Dashes, it's going to come up and say it is just using the default
line type, which is a solid black type. I want to tell it to switch from Default to
a Solid Line, and I'm going to change the color to let's say, Steel. Then click Okay. That is what
I'm looking for. See how that kind of fades out? It's lighter now. It is not so heavy back here. Here I have a cool,
I don't know if it is a trick of the eye, but when you have this color on darker colors like this, it
actually kind of glows a little bit; whereas, it seems a little heavier and solid on a solid white.
Just kind of a cool look that I can get just by setting a couple of things. I could save this as a
Template right now, for that matter. Then it would flip these things on when I bring in a new model.
There we go! That is exactly what I was looking for, what I was hoping for.
We got that nice composite fade, we have a nice shadow underneath, and I have some custom line
work that is not too heavy in the back, but still maintains its crispness in the front.
That was kind of a fun one. I was playing around in SketchUp and started one of those,
"I wonder if I could..." kind of things. I could, because I made this! Hopefully you liked that. If so,
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