[Tutorial] Easy Multiple Sketchy Line Weights

[Dave R]

Every so often someone will ask how to get different line weights in SketchUp. Short of Profile edges, there's nothing you can really do in SketchUp but here's a simple process that might be useful. It's probably old hat to many folks but maybe it will help someone. I've used one of my sketchy line styles for this but in truth, it would work with the default vector lines as well. It may not work in every case—I haven't explored them all—but I think with proper layer management, it will work in most of cases. I know the subject is nothing to get excited about. It was just in my list of recently opened SKPs.

I started with an export at view size. In this case it is 1222x810. This is Monochrome face style but it could be any style.

Then, for this example, I unsoftened all the edges and switched to Hidden Line.

Then I made an export at 3000x1988.

I opened both images in an image editor and resized the Hidden Line export to the same size as the other image, copied it and pasted it to a new layer in the other image. I set that layer to Multiply and ended up with the following.

It took longer for me to type this out than to create the image.

As I said, it might not be new to many but it also might not be so obvious to others. Hopefully someone will get some ideas from it.

I can think of all sorts of variations on this method that would be as easy and quick.