Sketchy line style without loss of detail?
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Is there any way to have a sketchy line without losing detail?
We do a lot of sketchup design modeling and we also do a lot of hand sketching and rendering in photoshop. It is important to our photoshop work that our hand sketched lines are complete so that we can quickly generate selection sets and apply washes etc. A sketched line with breaks in it is something we don't typically draw by hand.
We have recently been playing with style builder attempting to approximate our hand sketches... The difficulty we are having with this approach is the loss of detail that we experience with sketchy line styles... Even with the detail slider pegged to the max we see lines with gaps and breaks and lines in the distance that disappear. Any thoughts or help on this would be appreciated. thanks in advance!Chad
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Look at Dave Richards styles. I'd think you'd find some good ones or some idea of how to construct one.
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Chad, how many different stroke lengths are you using when you create a style? And what lengths?
Peter, thanks for the mention.
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Hi Dave, We have tried using all six stroke lengths and are typically using 3-5 strokes per length. Hope that is what you were looking for. thanks for your help!
Chad
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Hi Chad,
Which lengths are you using? The maximum number of lengths is 7. When I create styles I use 10 strokes in each of all seven available lengths. I set the Dropout length to zero and Fade factor to 1 (their minimum settings). Even then, it is possible to see some lines drop out if they are shorter than the shortest available stroke. There are a some things you can do to pick up those lines, though. One is to export the images at a larger size. While this will get shorter line segments to show, it also makes the lines appear thinner. I find this to be useful for a number of reasons but it may mean you'll want to make thicker strokes than you have been.
If you have curves in your model and their edges are exploded or segmented, each segment will get its own stroke. These edges might be too short to be rendered. Even if they do show in the exported image, their appearance can be nasty if you have extensions turned on. Welding the curves together will improved their appearance.
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Hi Dave, will definitely give your suggestions a go on the dropout length and fade factor... We typically export at 5000 pixels wide which gets us a great platform to work with in photoshop etc. We are finding we are getting a nice thin line when we bring our scanned lines in at 64pixels then adjust them to 8 and allow the software to scale the lines...We have done lots of tests and manipulations on our scanned lines but are finding once we get to 1 pixel wide any further tweeks have no impact. Welding curves and repairing lines is a great suggestion too...We are also testing out upscaling the entire model to see if that has any impact on detail...so we would save an output model and scale it up unrealistically in order to give the lines more length than they would have at real scale... will let you know how that goes.
We are testing whether physically scaling the model has any impact on loss of linework
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Scaling the model shouldn't have any impact because in order to get the same view you have move the camera back (zoom back) an equivalent amount. This is all dependent on the lengths of the edges in pixels on screen or in the image export, not in model units.
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Exactly as you state, fussing with the model scale did nothing. welding and repairing edges did result in less loss of detail. We are dialing in the max export size we can achieve and will report the findings. I wish the detail slider would slide about half more to the right:)
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It would be nice if it did but to do that requires more, shorter strokes. Make sure your style includes all seven stroke lengths.
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