How I Go from SketchUp to Digital Sketch (Photoshop, Wacom Cintiq)

hey everybody Eric here and today we're going to go beyond desktop in order to put the sketch back in [Music] SketchUp so if you're like me you probably like putting a lot of detail in your model and you take a lot of pride in having a really goodlooking model but there are some reasons why you actually want to pull back on the level of detail even if you have it already modeled or even if you can model it fairly easily so the idea of modeling just enough information to give you a base layer to sketch over the top of especially in the early phases of a project like when it's an early concept it's actually a great tool to be able to do so what I'm going to do right now is share with you not just the sketching part of the process but even before the things we need to think about to get our sketch ship model prepped in order to be able to export to draw on top of in an app like Photoshop let's just get to it so we're going to come back to this in a minute like all things with these videos they start in SketchUp even if we're going to go somewhere else so I'm going to start with this model here maybe have seen it before maybe not it's kind of a cool little Courtyard canopy concept for like a uh office complex and what I want to do is think about the information that I need now one thing I didn't model here was a bunch of plants number one it was going to take me a while number two sometimes stuff from 3D Warehouse can be really high po so what I'm going to do is sort of leave the plants out I like to draw those anyway same thing with the people I could choose to kind of turn the people on and off if I want to draw my own people maybe I turn them off in this case they're pretty basic people so I think I can just draw over the top of them um and that's pretty much it so what I want to start with is just simple lines just black and white lines so I want to come up here to view face style and I'm going to go hidden line now what that does is it knocks out the color so almost like a pencil sketch like a really light version this is going to be the base that I draw on top of but I need to do one more thing I do have a sky in here so I kind of want to turn that off I just want like super I want it to be just plain white so now that one's ready to export file export 2D graphic the settings are totally up to you I'm using my view size which is 1920 by uh 936 so not quite 1080p uh to just think about you know the size you want it I'm going to go I'm going to call this SketchUp lines and I say SketchUp because I will be drawing some handdrawn lines now the next thing I want is some Shadows I may or may not want to draw all the Shadows myself at least we should take a look at what the Shadows look like here in SketchUp um because chances are I'm going to use those and then I'll just kind of add some where I where I want to so I'm going to turn the profiles and edges off so that everything kind of disappears which maybe is a little bit concerning but when I come up here to turn my Shadows which I have a little icon if I want to use that or I can come up here and turn them on within the Shadows dialog box and there are my Shadows back now this is where you know we got to probably darken it to a point where if we wanted to select the Shadows we don't want them too light even though I do like Light Shadows I can always go back in Photoshop later and darken them or change the color and then here I need to think about where I want the Shadows to fall it's a little bit dark in the foreground if I'm going to do this as a sketch maybe I want to lighten that up a little bit maybe I want to push the Shadows to something like earlier in the morning um you know where I think a little bit more of this Courtyard I think is in the sun I think that looks pretty good so I'm going to go file export 2D Graphics same thing I'm just going to call this Su for short for SketchUp and shadows so that's two down two of three we only need to do one more this last one actually is optional this last one is what I call color by tag so turn the Shadows off and while the lines and edges aren't showing this is perfect I'm going to turn my face style view let's see here face Style I want to go back to shaded with textures it's a little bit dark but don't worry we'll fix that I'm going to come up here also to my tags panel and there's this little if you hover over it color by tag so I'm going to turn that on now my tags have different colors to organize um different things and different elements so I purposefully gave those different colors not going to go into that there's plenty of videos that kind of explain how that works but back back in the shadow settings what I want to do is push the darkness slider up to 90 and the lightness slider down to zero what this does is it gives me basically a true and uniform color so you'll notice there's no shading or anything now this is for um if you're familiar with rendering then you would know that you can this is like kind of a material ID export and if I wanted to do a quick select of just my glazing just what's glass I can just say select everything that's cyan colored and this will help me when I'm drawing if I want to stay out of a certain area if I want to mask a certain area so I'm going to go file I'm going to export this is my third export 2D graphic and I'm going to call this of course SketchUp again just so that I know in CBT which is short for color by tag so let's see what we've got here we've got if we did this right we should have one two three exports here in uh on our on my desktop or in my file that I saved them to so I'm going to bring those over you can't see but I'm going to hover them over into hover them over to photoshop and because they were all exported with the same proportions I just hold shift and drag and drop the lines in and then hold shift and drag and drop the shadows in good um habits is probably just to rename them if they didn't come in with their names and I'm going to call that the same names that I've already had before and um I shouldn't really name the Shadows cuz I'm going to change it in just a second you'll see here so let's zoom in just a little bit not too much and then what I want to do here the first thing I want to do pretty much I always do is I kind of get rid of the darkness of these Shadows so I just bring this in as a placeholder in Photoshop if you know Photoshop um then you know that you can select by color range so in this case I'm going to select everything that's this sort of dark gray or medium gray there's a slider here so if you want to select more or less of something you can do that and this isn't really a Photoshop lesson so I'm not going into any of the details too much about how Photoshop works but it should give me a good selection of mostly this sort of um dark gray color range so if I turn this layer off and create a new one then I might call this SketchUp Shadow and if I want to keep the old one I may want to differentiate it or I can just dump the old one because I don't really need it anymore and I'm going to call this Shadow color so in this case I'm going to come over here and paste a new color and if you don't like this purple color you know obviously you can you can if you're doing this at home you can pick whatever color you want blue Shadows you want sort of more warm Shadows um you can pick whatever you want the point of this was really to kind of say that hey I I actually want to bring in a little bit of that um I want to bring in a little bit more of a popup color and not just have that sort of be uniform so that's it so that's it with the shadows I'm kind of done with the Shadows there's some more we can do if I want to paint some shadows in I'm going to do that in just a second um we can paint some more shadows in but this is a pretty good start this gives us most of our shadows now let's pop over to the SketchUp lines they're a little bit dark and I'm about I'm going to trace them myself so what I'm going to do is I want to pull back um again I'm just using them as a reference so maybe I would pull them all the way back to something like 50% or 25% 35% somewhere in there and this color by tag this is going meant to be frozen so again this is only if we need to do like a quick selection like if I wanted to select everything um within my canopies you can see how quick that was for me to select this if I wanted to draw within that or paste some color or something like that so we're going to come back to that in just a second right now I want to get into the sketching part so right now we only have four uh we only have four layers and three if I get rid of those gray Shadows so right now we're doing pretty good keeping our file simple I want to pop over here I want to create two new um let's see here I want to create two new one two new layers one of these is going to be for Sketch color I'm just calling it Sketch color so I know the difference between sketch and sketch up and this one is going to be sketch lines so with the sketch lines here now this is probably a good point for me to share what I'm drawing on which is this is a cintique so I'm going to switch cameras here to my cintique so what you should be able to see is here's my pen and if you don't have a antique then this works just as well you can see the process with the iPad the thing that I like about Photoshop is that if you're working in Photoshop you can just send it from your desktop over to your iPad and then instead of using a cintique pen you're using the apple pencil so again whether you're using procreate Photoshop more folio Trace any of those thing that's up to you the tool is yours but the process is kind of what I want to focus on so here we go sketch lines now now that I kind of showed you how I'm drawing here let's go ahead and draw some stuff in I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to draw um like like I said the vegetation might be really difficult to get these climbing vines you know get them perfect and they might be really high poly so this would be a good thing that I might be able to draw just really quick with just a loose little textural thing same thing here maybe there's um some Vines climbing up this sort of green wall and just kind of decide the level of detail it all kind of depends on you know how much time you have but this actually might be way faster than doing um you know arranging scattering vegetation or going in and finding looking at the 3D Warehouse because this is really just meant to be um it's a concept right so what are these plants I don't know do they grow in this area I don't know exactly I want want some ferns something that maybe can or some Palms that can do well in the shade maybe put some something like some flowers some on the Vines um so I'm just drawing fairly fast and you'll notice I'm not even switching um pen weights so if I was going to do this for real and I really wanted this to look super cool I'd maybe use different pen weights or pencils but what I'm doing is just kind of really quickly putting in things that I didn't either have time to find an Entourage or things that maybe somebody had marked up and that were missing um hanging fans and fixtures climbing vines signage you know stuff again that from a design standpoint maybe doesn't need to be modeled but maybe could be just brought in fairly quickly with some with some um squiggled lines and if you have people here for me I'm kind of simplifying I'm not trying to draw too much detail over the scale figs and the reason why is because if I wanted to add some people my people tend to be um a little more blocky and you know I don't know crab like in their legs so if I wanted to draw a few more people you know I would I would want to maybe have that consistent look so even if I draw over the scale figs that are already in there I might simplify them a little bit again putting some people that are dining and sitting down down now I could keep doing this I could draw I could do this I could spend quite a while drawing just tracing this but that's kind of the point is that even though it feels redundant you can go in and create you know a sketchy line style if you wanted to um and it does kind of feel redundant to go in and draw over this like like I am but what's really cool is that it feels like if I took you know again here just as a really quick example you can see that just in a couple of minutes of sketching I've got something that looks um pretty loose and again I can kind of choose here maybe I want to put a layer mask and maybe I want to come in and mask out some of the stuff that came in from the SketchUp model so that I'm kind of picking and choosing what I want to show from my hand drawing and what I want to show from the SketchUp model and that's kind of a way to do it you could either cover it up with like some with some paint or you could kind of mask out some of the stuff um so again I'm using this SketchUp model to do some of the things that I'm not maybe I don't want to draw every single one of these windows well that would be a good way to come in and and use either use the selection tool or I could come in and use the ma mask out just the windows and then let that show in so this is kind of like a hybrid approach where I'm only drawing the things that I think where I want to draw your attention to or your focus like the ground plane um or where I want to I know it would take me too long if I was to sit and try and like model all of these finds and stuff by myself um in SketchUp so again the reasons kind of vary for why I might choose to do one over the other let's put a quick pop of color in this thing before we wrap up so like I said I I kind of spent some time and effort doing this um exporting this color by tag so if I wanted to I could come over here and grab something like just this ground plane select color range ground plane and then turn that off and then on my sketch collar layer could maybe grab and you don't really need a pen display for this if you really wanted to you could probably do this fairly well with um you know it's really just a if you're coloring it anyway you could do the um you could kind of do a lot of this too with a mouse but I do like the kind of looseness that you get so here is um I'm on the Sketch color I'm just kind of putting this color wash in same thing here if I wanted to put the lines above this I could do that you know so that we could see those score lines and you can start to see this come together so let me pull up the one let me stop there because of course I can get I get carried away and I have fun and I start putting in little splashes of color everywhere but let me stop there and switch over to my finish one and then we'll wrap up by taking a look at what that kind of looks like with one that's had a little bit more time and energy put into it so this is the one that I finished you'll notice the difference between this one and the other one is that I have a background I put a sky in and I put a frame around it so let me zoom out just a little bit um so you can see if I turn that frame off and I turn that Sky off we're left in basically the same position that I started with just a few minutes ago with you turn the Shadows off you can see I've got my sketch lines can pull back the color of those make them lighter or I can push that up and make that a little bit darker and you can see what happens when I turn that color when I turn that color off um same thing I can sort of push that color back a little bit or I can push it up to full saturation and then you can see lastly I've got these SketchUp lines these SketchUp lines are faded way back so I can push those forward and of course it gets darker or you can push them back and just have them there just as that sort of subtle reference I'm going to leave it there because like I said and to do this properly I would need more than a YouTube video maybe this will become a SketchUp campus course or something someday but the points that I want to reinforce are number one is you don't need a lot from your SketchUp model you need lines you need Shadows if you have color and you want to bring a base layer of color you can do that too if you have you want to do the CBT uh which is the color by tag so you can do selections you can add that in that helps as well um but it's basically each model is going to be a little bit different so point is though is have some fun put some creative expression on it and uh don't don't be afraid to just jump in and play around that's how I learned how to do all this stuff is just by playing around so I'm going to leave you with that I'm going to thank you all for watching and uh let me know in the comments below do you sketch already do you use more folio Trace are you a procreate person are there apps that I haven't even heard of do you go to illustrator let me know what your process is and I would love to learn from you in the comments so thanks as always and see you next [Music] time

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 5,231

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling

Id: k1HoPL0dctI

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024