Checking Out a Style Builder Workflow

How is a sketchy edge style born? Compared to stars emerging from a nebula or a baby mammal barely able to open its eyes, the style-building process is pretty quick and easy. Your sketchy edges may even look out of this world or too cute for words.

Whether you’re new to Style Builder or you haven’t created your own sketchy edge style for a while, understanding the overall process of how style building works is helpful. The following steps walk you through a workflow for creating styles and point you to articles where you find more specifics about how each step works:

1. Open a new or existing Style Builder file.
2. Draw the strokes you want to use for your sketchy edge style. You can create these in a template that you generate in Style Builder. Or scan strokes you’ve drawn by hand into an image editor.
3. Import the strokes you want use. You can load strokes from your template, a folder of images, or an existing style. When you import the strokes, they appear as a stroke library on the Strokes tab.
4. Drag and drop strokes from a stroke library to the slots for their corresponding length in a set. You can add or remove length sets, choose how may strokes appear in each set, and adjust the width of all the strokes in the Sets pane.
5. On the Settings tab, select how you want strokes to fade, the stroke color, and what edge effects you want to apply to all the strokes in the Sets pane. Also, be sure to give your style a name.
6. Preview how your style appears and adjust the settings, strokes, or widths as needed.
7. When you’re happy with the way your sketchy edge style looks, save the .style file.
8. In SketchUp, use the Mix tab to apply your sketchy edge style to your SketchUp models.