A nice and easy way of getting shadows with a hand-made hatched look for your SketchUp presentation.
In SketchUp:
- Choose a Sketchy Edges style that you like;
- Turn off shadows and export an image (Fig. 1);
- Now turn on shadows and under the Edit tab of the Styles panel, turn off the edges and export a second image (Fig. 2);
In Photoshop:
- Open the first (edges only) image;
- Add the second (shadows only) image to a new Layer;
- Use Levels on the shadows only layer to make it dark enough to get good contrast with the white background (Fig. 3);
- On this same shadows only layer, use Color Range to select the shadow areas;
- Apply Feather (Shift+F6) with a 3 px setting (or more, depending on your image size, this example was 400px wide);
- Hide the shadows only layer and create a new one, while keeping your selection in place;
- Find a Brush similar to your SketchUp edge style and fill the canvas with it, your selection will keep the strokes inside the shadow areas. Use Ctrl+H if you want to hide the selection border as you do it (we used a tablet to get a more natural looking hatch);
- Combine your shadow hatch layer with the edges as you see fit.
To get SketchUp edges looking simmilar to those from your Photoshop Brush, you might want to have a look at the Style Builder, available with Google SketchUp Pro. Take a thin Photoshop Brush (less than 4 px), create some straight strokes and import them on Style Builder where you can create a new SketchUp sketchy edge style. Exporting the edge only image using this style and then using the same brush on Photoshop will create a more consistent look.
Do you know if this can be done using Inkscape?
Hi Tim, This could be done using Gimp, instead of Adobe Photoshop.
Also, if you happen to have a copy of RpTools for SketchUp, you can create Sketchy Shadows automatically using the Sketchy Shadows feature.
See: http://www.renderplus.com/wk/Sketchy_Shadows_w.htm