Easy Geometry from PDFs with PDF IMPORTER for SketchUp!

what's up guys Justin here with the SketchUp essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out an extension for SketchUp that Imports PDFs as geometry let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so if you've ever tried to import a PDF into SketchUp before and you're on a PC you know that could be a little bit tricky and so if you do a file import you click on your drop down right here note that on a PC there is no option in here to import any kind of PDF and so a lot of the time what you end up doing is you end up taking a snip of an image and then you end up saving it and doing a file import and importing that image file now the problem with that is you can definitely bring this in you can explode it and then you can set it to scale using the tape measure tool if you want to do that but it's not very precise right there's no snap points on these Corners so we're getting like close but then the other thing is there's no geometry in here right it's just kind of an image that then you're going to group and you're going to draw on top of and so that's not necessarily ideal right because it can be really time consuming going in here and modeling all of this stuff yourself okay so what we can do instead is we can use PDF importer from John Brock in order to bring in your vector-based PDFs directly in SketchUp and so basically the way that works is you're just going to be able to import the PDF files now a couple limitations real quick and I guess from a cost standpoint too the cost is 79 a year so it might not be a hobby tool I can tell you that the amount of time you can save just importing a vector PDF as geometry it'll pay for itself in like one or two uses from a Time standpoint but if you're just a hobby user it might not be your best but the other thing about this is it is limited to importing Vector PDFs it's not going to work with raster PDFs so because those don't have any data in them they're just they're just images basically so those aren't going to work it's only going to work with the ones with Vector data inside of them and so basically the way that it works is you do a file import and then now what it's going to do is it's going to give you the ability to find that PDF file and again remember it does need to be a vector PDF file it's got some options in here for the kinds of lines that you can set it to create but basically you just double click on it and it's going to pop up a preview window you can use the preview window window in order to set what you import so in this case right I've only got one drawing on the screen but if you had like multiple elevations or something like that you might only want to import them one at a time but you can pick the location then click on import PDF and when you do that it's going to take the vector data that's in here and it's going to import it into SketchUp now a couple things about this first off and probably most importantly note that when it comes in it's not going to come in to scale right so if I click in here notice how this is 14 feet long and we want this to be 13 feet this is a pretty easy fix because all I need to do is just take the whole thing and rescale it so I can just click on my tape measure tool tap control to make sure I'm not in create guide mode then I can click between these points type in a value of 13 feet because that's what I want this length to be and hit the enter key it's going to ask if I want to resize the model and I'm going to say yes and it's going to resize the model then everything gets brought in to scale so like for example if I was to look at this door and measure it so we'll go here to here notice how that's in here to three feet so now we've got this whole thing in here to scale and so the other thing to note about this is sometimes this stuff comes in in kind of odd groups so then what you might need to do is you might need to take all of this and explode it so that you don't have all these crazy groups in here but then it's just as simple as drawing over a top of a couple of these edges so really the easier way to do this is there's an extension called inner auth face creator which you can download from the SketchUp extension warehouse but when you run that with these objects selected it's going to find all of the possible faces and it's going to make them and so what that did is that came in here and that actually created all of these individual faces in here for us without us having to go through and Trace any of this at all so that's a really powerful way to import these and then create the walls really quickly and so again remember this does need to be that Vector data so let's say for example that I took this in layout and exported it to an image first so if I took this out of layout and I exported to an image and then I printed that image to a PDF and then I tried to import it so if I tried to import this non-vector image notice that that is going to show up in your preview pane but if I click on import PDF nothing's actually going to be imported because that's raster data not Vector data right so that's where I'm in this video leave a comment below let me know what you think about PDF importer if you're using something like this I just love having that conversation with you guys I'll link to PDF importer in the notes down below if you're interested as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 48,219

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup 2021, sketchup 2020, sketchup PDF importer, sketchup import PDF

Id: ucZMM1P6ZVM

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023