Import Dwg Into Sketchup Make 2017

[Lilliana Adames]

ImportingSketchUp files works great. I haven't had as much success exporting to SketchUp though, particularly in regards to textures. I've found the mapping to be way off, and many objects lose their textures. I personally wouldn't want to be sending a file back and forth between the two programs in an ongoing fashion.

I've been whinging about the trial and tribulations associated with exporting to SketchUp for years now, alas to no avail. The philosophy held by many in the VW community is that SketchUp is really unnecessary given all that VW currently does. I've always maintained however, that Sketchup is vastly more nimble at conceptualization and communicating design than VW. The learning curve is much less steep than VW. Principals of firms like it, and can use it. Making life easier between the two programs would only work to increase VW's market share.

I've exported models using this technique to the satisfaction of my baby boomer boss. It takes about 15 minutes to get everything cleaned up and ready to use. And materials/colors seem to export with this technique.

When you want to push pull on shapes in Sketchup, make sure that soft and smooth edges are unchecked! You will have to turn materials off and show outlines only. Most of the time soft and smooth will be checked. Uncheck these boxes.

I may be old & too tied to VW, but I find the whole SU interface to be mindnumpingly counter intuitive. I have never been able to really get the hang of it. I know one needs "time on tools" & lots of folks love it, but I just find it so frustrating to use.

Sketchup is easy to use, but one needs to figure out a few things first before it starts to make sense and you get the hang of it. That being said, I started doing 3D in CAD and often require exact positioning, both on location and relative to each other, and that is where the 3D programs like Sketchup to be too cumbersome to use compared to Vectorworks. It is almost like trying to squeeze ketchup

Of course it all depends on your needs.

I like the Sketchup to Vectorworks export to get some quickly rendered OpenGL scenes (they look much nicer when rendered in Vectorworks) but I can't get the Sketchup faceme symbols to work after I import them into Vectorworks.

If you do have access to Rhino then importing into Rhino first, if necessary fix some things in Rhino, and then import the Rhino file into VW may give you good enough results to continue with as it often reduces mesh/triangulation complexity.

I've been working to import a VW 2020 model into Sketchup Pro 2021 and found the SimLab FBX Importer to work smoothly, though I now have a complex SU model with nested groups and components. The walls and floor slabs are split by story, but there's no Vectorworks rendering to mask the transitions. Since each wall is a series of nested groups and components, it is challenging to clean this up. Any advice/insight? I've started a tread here:

I'm going to withdraw my recommendation for FBX Importer and SimLab! I bought the plugin in February and used it then without incident. Recently, I wanted to use it again. I opened SketchUp, ungraded as requested, tried to use the plugin and was told it needed to be registered. I couldn't make that work and have spent the better part of two weeks going back and forth with customer service, being accused of installing it on multiple machines and being told to do the same failed registration steps over and over again. They told me I had "one last chance." It didn't work and they've stopped answering my emails. I found a similar plugin from "skimp" ( ) that seems to be working fine so far...

You can create a new OpenStudio Space and copy/paste the relevant geometry into it. Other than that I'm not sure there is an 'easy' way. There might be some way to script it, but it would be hard to disaggregate the individual spaces from the SketchUp geometry. I'd watch the tutorial videos if you haven't already. It's easiest to create spaces from a 2d outline in SketchUp or drawing the geometry directly into an OpenStudio Space group.

Thank you for the answer Adam. That method worked. I am working with an Architect who renders buildings in Sketchup so being able to import their model into Sketchup with the OpenStudio plugin is a valuable methodology.

I took the original Sketchup file and created individual files for each thermal zone by deleting the surfaces and subsurfaces not part of the zone space. Then I loaded each zone into Sketchup with the OpenStudio plug in and copied the space elements into a new OpenStudio space as per your instructions then saved it as a unique OpenStudio file. Then using the method shown in the NREL Merge Zones video, I was able to congregate the thermal zones (spaces) to create an model of the entire building into one Openstudio file. What I discovered was that I had to have a unique name for each space, otherwise the Merge file method would replace the existing OpenStudio space.

The method is someone tedious, but the original Sketchup building model, though not large, it had some complex surface elements. So this saved the effort in creating a new model in the OpenStudio plugin from scratch. For simple buildings in the past, I have created the zones using a text editor for the EnergyPlus idf input file.

For simple buildings and Legacy Open Studio plugin, I have done this:In the sketchup file, I creat a new energy plus zone, and simply copy the whole building to the new zone. Once I am sure everything is in the new zone, I delete the original drawing and save as... new name.idfHope it helps

I have recently got a 3d model from Grabcad. I converted a laborious way but worked, I used widows screen shot and copied and cropped in paint then saved the file as png and imported in inkscape then traced it and corrected it. the final outcome was not bad. hope this is helpful.

chandra

Robert: Sorry for the long delay. I did watch your video and it did make things clearer. Still, as I mentioned to Glenn, I find the whole process very cumbersome; will continue to look for something better (I hope). Thanks for the help, though.

Given that a 1x1km area consists of roughly 4,000,000 datapoints, I suspect that the first step is to create mesh with significantly less points (e.g. 100,000 to 400,000) before importing it into Sketchup.

My second attempt was to visit This data is slightly older (AHN2 from 2008 instead of AHN3 from 2015), but has similar high resolution (0.5 meter), and served my purpose. The websites has a great export function to select and download the region I was interested in. I downloaded two LAZ files with a 4mln and 150,000 point cloud, the later for testing.

This worked reasonably well for the sample export (170,000 points translated to 130,000 faces). It will not work for the 4,000,000 point export. Unfortunately, the subsampling resulted in a slightly larger mesh size (150,000 faces), not smaller, and I can't find a way for CloudCompare to reduce the complexity of the Mesh model. An alternative is to hand-pick points, and export that point list, but that seems rather tedious.

I have done quite a bit of basic framing in the past, and I have years of residential building design under my belt, so I knew I could handle the design and build myself. With a general idea of what I wanted to build, I hopped into SketchUp to figure exactly what I needed to do to make this idea a reality.

With that in mind, I started modeling. To start, I threw a basic deck size/shape on the back of an existing model I had of my house (I am going to go out on a limb and say that I believe that MOST SketchUp users have some kind of a model of wherever they live... if not... that should probably be your next project). This created some very basic dimensions and rough location of the deck.

From the model, it looked like about 16 feet wide and 10 feet deep would work. With that in mind, I started looking into materials. First I needed to know how deep my deck material would be. With the help of an online span calculator, I found that 2x8s should work fine for my joists. Next step was to see what I could actually get my hands on, so I searched online to see what could be delivered that was at least 2x8' and pressure treated (a requirement for exterior framing).

I was able to find 2x8s in both 10' and 16' lengths at my local store! If I did this right, I could build the entire frame of my deck with little to no cutting! Better make sure, though... time to head back into SketchUp and model up a few joist components!

Nice! With this, I was able to confirm that I could order a single 6x6" wide, 10' long beam for all four posts! Armed with this information, I could now figure out where the caissons would need to be placed! Based on local building requirements, I knew the caissons would need to be 30" deep and extend 6" above grade. How much concrete would I need? How do I even calculate the volume of a cylinder? I have no idea... but with SketchUp, I modeled a 10" circle, used Push/Pull to make it 36" long, then grouped it, and selected it to determine the amount of concrete needed!

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