Printing full scale templates of Tim Killen’s Outdoor Bench
Hello. The printing options in SketchUp Free seem to be very limited especially when you’re wanting and needing to print templates to scale. There seems to be a work around though; exporting the scene/template to Photoshop, saving it as a PDF and then printing the file choosing poster size and then taping the sheets together making the full size template. I’ve tried and tried but can’t get this process to work. Does anyone have any experience and most importantly success in this printing process? Any comments or You Tube videos would be most appreciated. Thanks. Michael
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I have tile-printed in the past. It can be done, but the prints can be wonky and fragile. Now I take the files to Staples and drop a few bucks for prints I can roll or fold up easily. They will even print two-sided if you press them on it.
Thanks MJ. If you're using the free version of SketchUp and you'd be so willing, please let me know what type of file your take to Staples, (pdf?), and how is the file saved so it is to scale 1:1. Thanks much.
I'm using sketch up pro 2020, the desktop version. I never print from sketchup as I use layout. However, from sketchup File/print or File/print preview, unchecking the print to fit option should light up the print to scale option and you can enter the scale directly and print. You have to be in a standard view and the camera set to parallel projection for this to work otherwise the scale dialog box will remain greyed out. It is likely this function is not available in the free version but if you haven't already gone there it would be worth a try.
A work around might be to copy and paste the part you want to scale to a new drawing, then print it directly from sketchup, measure a dimension on the print. Divide the correct dimension by the measured value from the print to calculate a scaling factor. Then use the factor to resize the entire drawing.
For example, say a 3" line prints at 1.5", the scaling factor would be 2. In your drawing measure the line again, in the dialog box at bottom right change the 3" dimension to 6". Confirm you want to resize the drawing and print again, it should come out right. For patterns that won't fit on one page, break up with witness lines, then copy and paste on separate drawings to keep things manageable . If you have a PDF reader that allows scaling by a percentage, another option would be to export to PDF and rescale in the reader.
Hope this makes sense and maybe helps.
Rob
Thanks for your detailed response. I think my problem is SketchUp Free. My guess would be that a template scene in a project plan would already be full scale 1:1 but I can't seem able to save it to a file in full scale so it can be brought to Staples/FedEx for printing. Any thoughts? Thanks. Michael
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