Transcript:
When you’re working on a 3d architectural model and Sketchup, sometimes you need to export a 2d graphic to illustrator, so you can do some edits and use the graphic for other purposes. So in this video. I’m going to show you a few tips for editing. This exported graphic in Adobe Illustrator, so in Sketchup, choose file export 2d graphic and choose PDF file as your format then set the export options as you want them and next open up the PDF in Adobe Illustrator now in Illustrator. If I zoom in and go into outline mode, we can see this area here. That really looks like a flat Plane of grass is actually divided up into these triangles. These facets that are coming from the 3d model, just sort of trying to show the topography there, but we don’t need all of these shapes. They can show up in your presentation in Pdfs or preview and so one of the things I’m going to show you how to do is to just combine these into a single solid shade. So if I back out a little bit, we can see. There are several areas where that grass is, and we’re going to change them all at once, so in a case like this. The magic wand is your friend. I’m gonna go over and double. Click on the Magic Wand to get its options and by default, it’s set to fill color with a tolerance of 32 What I want to do is go ahead and just take this all the way down to 0 since I know all of these are the same color, and then when I go and click on one of these triangles, I get a selection of all objects that have this green fill color in the file. The next step is to go to the Pathfinder. That’s right here. This little overlapping square icon and the first shape mode unites all of these shapes. Now it doesn’t matter that they’re not contiguous shapes. That’s not going to be a problem, we can just do this. All in one fell swoop. So I’m just gonna click on the Unite button and we can see all of those. Little triangles are gone. The Pathfinder has merged any of the contiguous shapes in the selection now. I’m going back to my arrow tool using the shortcut, Vee. And when I select this, I can see This is a group and that’s a function of having used the Pathfinder. It just takes everything that you have in your selection that you’re uniting and turns it into a group and I’m gonna zoom in a little bit on this area here now. Unfortunately, when exporting to Sketchup, you still get all of these little sliver e shapes here where it’s drawing the green inside of every rib of this pergola. These are individual shapes, not just one big green shape that flows behind the pergola. So that’s just something that we have to live with, but let’s go ahead and go to the layer’s panel right here, and I’m gonna go to layer options panel options and choose a large size so that we can really see the layer thumbnails better, so I’ve typed in 40 pixels. I’ll click OK, And now we have larger thumbnails. So everything in this file is just on one layer. That’s how it comes out in the PDF. Now I have this group with all the grass shape selected and I can go down at the bottom of my layer’s panel and locate the object by clicking on this little magnifying glass and that drives me right to that group inside of the layer’s panel. So if you can see this thumbnail, we have these three larger areas of grass and then inside, there are so many little slices and slivers here, so trying to edit. This would be a bit of a nightmare, so this is why it makes sense to me to treat all of these green areas as one group as we did when we use the Pathfinder, and that way, you’ll just always be able to quickly select all of the green shapes at once. And then if you need to make a color change, you can double click here to get the color picker, and then just maybe brighten up this green or lighten up this green a bit. Now let’s use the Magic wand to select the line work in this file, so I exported this at a half a point line weight, and now that I see everything here in the file. I’ve decided I want to lower that point size little bit, so I’m going to zoom in and just select one of the lines here, but go up to the top control bar. I can see this object has no fill a black stroke and the stroke is half a point. I can use the Magic Wand to select all the other strokes in this file by setting the fill color tolerance to zero, that means we’re going to select everything that doesn’t have a fill and everything that has the same stroke color and everything that has the same stroke weight. So when I click with the Magic wand on that, I get a selection of all of the strokes in the file. I’m backing out so you can see this, and now I’m just going to go up here to the top control bar and change the stroke weight to a quarter of a point and that I’ve done throughout the file. Now let’s look at one last tip for making selections and edits using the Magic Wand Tool, let’s say. I want to change the color of all these planter boxes here. So what I’ll do is I’ll zoom in, so I can get really close and make some selections with the Magic Wand. Now I want to select these colored areas, so I’m going to take the stroke color and the stroke weight off, and I’ve got my fill color. Tolerance set to zero. I’ll get the Magic wand and I’ll click on this darker beige color here. Now you can add to a selection using the shift key, so if I hold down the shift key while I have the Magic Wand selected, you can see a little plus sign appears, and when I click in this light beige area, it selects all those areas as well. Now let me back out so I can see what I have selected. I have a lot of these planter boxes, but I also have other items here that I don’t want to be a part of this selection. So now while I have my magic wand selection active. I’m going to go and get another tool. This is the lasso tool. The lasso tool also works with the shift, key and option Alt so to remove from your selection hold down the option or Alt key and the lasso tool. Just draw a big circle around everything that you want to subtract and you can see. There’s a little minus sign there, and when I completed the circle, it removed all of these extraneous pieces here. So now when I look at my selection, all I have here are planter boxes. In fact, if I use the arrow keys on my keyboard, I can kind of nudge these aside just to confirm that that’s what I have in my selection, so I’m going to go ahead and put these back into place and now let’s do a color change to these. So there are two colors involved in the sides and the tops of these planter boxes, so the easiest way to change these all at once is to use recolor artwork. So what I’m going to do is lets. Move these so we can see them then. I’m going to click on the recolor artwork button here and this opens up the recolor art panel. Now we can see illustrator. Has these two beige tones that we have selected and I’m going to go over to the edit color wheel and just show you a really quick way to change this color. So the first step is that you want to lock your colors together, so I’m going to click on this lock or link button here and notice that the two color circles here are the dark beige and the light beige, and now that they’re locked together. I can move them together. So if I just drag these over here to an orange color, I’m starting to get something. That’s two tones of orange and let me darken this up a little bit great, so that’s what I want, and now all I have to do is click. OK, and all of those planter Boxes have been recolored at once with a little help from the Magic Wand Tool, the lasso tool and recolor artwork. So I hope you’ve enjoyed these tips for working with your Sketchup exports in Adobe Illustrator and I have another video where we’re going to talk about a plugin that can really help you do some cleanup of these. Sketchup exports.