Sketcup line color?


Mark J

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Freecad any good Ross?

2 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

Mark, I seem to recall there is a setting for line color under "styles" or some such menu. Might be different in various versions. I have switched to FreeCAD, so can't look it up quickly.

As Trimble have made it more and more difficult to sustain the use of it I’m happy to turn to something else that isn’t tendIng to online only.

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5 hours ago, TerryMcK said:

Freecad any good Ross?

As Trimble have made it more and more difficult to sustain the use of it I’m happy to turn to something else that isn’t tendIng to online only.

https://www.freecadweb.org/downloads.php

There is a learning curve. This is more like Inventor, Solid Works and the like. But POWERFUL. And its hard to beat free.

I'm still learning the ins and outs of part design, and recently discovered how to use experessions for part parameters. Creating a function to change the thickess of, let's say a drawer bottom, if the width exceeds a threshold, is awesome for creating a library of components that can quickly scale to any size.

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3 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

There is a learning curve. 

That's what keeps me in Sketchup.  Someday I'm gonna try one of the other programs, but it took me long enough to get the hang of Sketchup that I'm not looking forward to "starting over".  When the time does come, though, is there a reasonable tutorial for freecad?

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23 hours ago, Mark J said:

Does anyone know if there is a way to change the color of a line in basic Sketchup?  For clarity it would be useful to make some lines a different color than black.

Regarding the original question, here is how you change a line color.

First, go into your styles dialog box (Window/Styles) and on the Edit tab, click on the little wireframe box icon.  This lets you edit the "Edge Settings" for the style you are using.  Down at the bottom you will see a "Color" drop down box, which is set to "All same" by default.  Select "By Material" instead.  Save changes to your style by clicking on the main style image at the top of the window to "Update Style with Changes".

Now you should be able to use the normal materials dialog box (or the paint bucket tool) to paint edges whatever color you want. You can paint faces of course but you can also paint individual lines.

Note that when an edge is selected, it will always turn blue to show what you have active (unless you have changed the default blue color to something else).  So after you paint a line, it may look blue until you click on something else.

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Hmmm...just tried again and it's working for me.  Not trying to be snarky, just covering all bases:

You are trying to paint it something other than the default material color, correct?  Maybe a nice red?

Draw a couple random faces (not lines) and paint them red.  Then right click on an edge and select "Entity Info".  You can also change the color for an object in that dialog box, but the trick there is that you can only select from colors that already exist in your model.

Also, make sure you unselect the edge  - or it will stay blue to show that it's selected.

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If you go that route you need to click with the paint bucket on each line you want to change, after clicking on one of the thumbnails in the Materials window. The pick box on that tool is pretty small, hard to see if you're older than 50.

A less tedious solution might be to select the last item in the drop down list "color by axis" That applies the axis colors to lines in an axis direction.

SKPlinecolors.jpg.69eea4596ddf6f927c8203564c34f11a.jpg

That doesn't give you control over specific lines.

 

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2 hours ago, AMarshall said:

Regarding the original question, here is how you change a line color.

First, go into your styles dialog box (Window/Styles) and on the Edit tab, click on the little wireframe box icon.  This lets you edit the "Edge Settings" for the style you are using.  Down at the bottom you will see a "Color" drop down box, which is set to "All same" by default.  Select "By Material" instead.  Save changes to your style by clicking on the main style image at the top of the window to "Update Style with Changes".

Now you should be able to use the normal materials dialog box (or the paint bucket tool) to paint edges whatever color you want. You can paint faces of course but you can also paint individual lines.

Note that when an edge is selected, it will always turn blue to show what you have active (unless you have changed the default blue color to something else).  So after you paint a line, it may look blue until you click on something else.

That works (I tried it on Sketchup 2017).

I found this step by step animation:

72fc9951083574a35a02f4608026395ff5640bb8.gif

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I got it to work, thank you all.  

In order to assign a color to the paint bucket you also need to open the 'materials' window, then the 'select' tab.  There is a drop down menu and one of the choices is 'colors'.  This is the window that is partly displayed on the left of the animation.  

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