Import and Cleanup CAD Files in SketchUp

hey everybody Eric here and today we're going Beyond SketchUp desktop in order to do a couple things which is firstly work with an imported CAD file but secondly look at a couple of extensions that are going to make working with that CAD file a little bit easier [Music] so for any of you that have had to or just maybe in your day-to-day practice work with CAD files you know that it really depends on how well they were drafted there's always going to be some work you need to do in SketchUp to get it to work sort of as efficiently or the way you expect it to now I normally say that the best thing you can do is get all your drafting done perfectly in CAD before you import it into SketchUp but if it's coming from somebody else like a consultant or even a team member that may be outside of your hands so I want to look at how to sort of import and organize basically an approach to getting started with Cad and then a couple ways to make that process of going from CAD to 3D or 2D to 3D a little bit more efficient so let's just go ahead and get to it I've got my finished file here it's actually not really finished but it's where we're going with this in just a minute but I want to start from scratch so let's just kind of just so you're starting uh with me we're going to open up a new SketchUp file a new blank file and let me pull open a cad file here that I have which if I'll just pop this in really quick just so you can see the process from the very beginning I'm going to leave all this stuff here and just kind of default just leave it all on the way it is and then close that looks like everything was okay that's great and there it is now the first thing I want to point out is that you know when you start a SketchUp file you can see I'm in perspective mode but uh so it almost makes me it's almost deceiving me to think I'm ready to start extruding but I actually want to take a step back and kind of say let's create maybe a drafting environment that mimics cat or mirrors CAD until I'm ready to make that transition fully so let me open up my tags here so I can see what I'm working with I've got a few uh looks like an L prefix so it came from the landscape architect and if I just turn some of those off and on it looks like everything's been organized nicely so that's great it's actually a pretty good start so first thing I want to do is sort of go sort of recreate the CAD drafting environment I'm going to come over here I'm going to set my standard view to top and I'm going to set it to parallel projection so now just like in cat I'm just sort of drafting straight down and then the other thing I want to do is I want to turn for this I'm just going to turn my Axis off I don't have to but I'm going to and then I want to change the style and the reason why is because I don't really know what's been drafted on what tag now I could go in and I could select something and open up my entity info and look at that but that's a little bit time consuming especially if you have a lot of layers so yes we will be doing that but in just a second firstly I want to see if I can shortcut that process a little bit and again just visually tap into some of that information that right now is not showing um with the way that it was drafted in CAD so I'm going to open up my styles and I've got a few options here but the first thing is uh there's this thing called color this is line color so right now it's gray it's sort of a dark gray like I like to use as my default and they're all the same so basically it's overriding any Edge color I can come over here and say buy material and you can see what happens so when I go buy material it changes to the same colors that they are in uh that they came from in cats so the road would be yellow and the road center lines would be blue and now I'm actually seeing the color of the um of the line work itself I'm also going to do this thing and watch and you'll see why in just a minute I'm also going to use this color by tag override and that's for if we create any faces it's going to also change the faces to the same color not just the edges so I want to create a new style maybe I'll call that CAD or something just so that I know remember what this is and then I want to create a scene to save that style so I'll do the same thing I'm going to call this CAD I'm going to uncheck camera location I'm going to show you why in just a minute it's kind of because this is a working scene so this isn't like a drafting scene or anything it's just something that we're working on so I'm going to uncheck that and then the next thing and I kind of uh maybe should have done this when I had my Styles panel open but if you have trouble seeing like I know I'm missing my buildings because they were on a white they were drawn on white maybe they shouldn't be I can change the color if I wanted to and they'll show up but the same time like yellow and light blue might be difficult to see on a white background I'm going to come over here turn my sky off and change my background color to something like a charcoal gray or a black something that you would expect to see in a cat drafting environment so I'm going to update that style and there we go so now I can actually kind of it kind of feels like I'm still in CAD and that's great so that was just so that I can see better or faster what I'm working with here now I'm going to do what I would normally say be careful doing but I'm going to kind of just kind of remind you when you start exploding things just kind of keep in mind that we're doing this intentionally so I want to explode everything in that came in and I'll show you why in just a second because I don't know how this was organized there were some groups you know there's no com there's no blocks or anything like that so I need to actually reorganize this now normally I would be really hesitant to have loose geometry all just kind of sticking together and Crossing together like this but with CAD when this comes in when your line work comes in from AutoCAD the actual Line work so the raw geometry is coming in on a is tagged so it's coming in and it's basically the AutoCAD layer is translated to a tag so it still preserves that so l-site was basically the drafting layer now that's good because even though these these lines may be overlapping in this case they retain the raw geometry retains the information the layer information I'm going to use that to my advantage here I'm going to select one line in this case say select all on the same tag and I'm going to just make that a group so you can see that even though if it's crisscrossing stuff or if it's overlapping things it's okay I'm only selecting the geometry on that tag and I'm going to come over here and say make that a group so now I know that that's protected and so if I wanted to go start filling in faces and extruding and moving things I know that that's safe now but one thing for those of you that have a good grasp of the fundamentals out there one thing I'm not doing is I'm not kind of following our rule which is that all uh geometry inside of a group should remain untagged so in this case it's an extra step to go back in I'm going to select everything using a keyboard shortcut and I'm going to move all of this from else site onto untagged so basically I'm going to move I'm going to I'm only using it to create the group and then just to make this a little bit easier to see anything that's untagged maybe I'll make this um I don't know orange okay so there we go so orange is untagged that kind of warns me now I'm going to put my group onto whether I want to put it onto the L building or whether I want to create a new tag and create one that's called s instead of l site I might do something like S Building because I'm about to make it into 3D so for me it's kind of a reminder that the s prefix means that I'm moving from CAD to SketchUp you don't have to do that and to add an S if you don't want to but that's okay so basically what you can see here is that now because it's changed color everything inside the group remains untagged and everything outside of the group now sits on a new SketchUp tag something that says I'm ready to go to 3D now I would do the same thing with all of these I'm not going to do this because it's the same step I would select all of these on the same tag I would group them I'm using a keyboard shortcut to speed the process up same thing with the Contours come over here to a contour if I can find a contour line there we go select all on the same tag and right click it make it a group so same process applies now a short way to do this if you wanted to not have to go into the group and select all the geometries you could just come over here and just delete once you've grouped everything like I could just come over to the L Contour I could delete that tag if you don't need it anymore and it'll just assign it to untagged the nice thing about that is you can see it turned orange when you delete a group everything inside of the group all that raw geometry is untagged it's a bit of a shortcut so either way however you like to do it now let's move on to the second part of this now that I've got this organized here I want to start making some faces so for this I'm going to turn let's say I'm going to go and hide my Contours just for a minute because they're untagged otherwise I have to put it create a new tag for them and I want to come in here and I want to make faces for my buildings now if your geometry is really good and your lines are all closed and everything's perfect then I should just be able to draw a line along the edge here and it'll automatically fill the face in so that's great but if you've worked with CAD at home most of you know that it's not that simple like when I have my um hidden I might have these Contours and when you're drafting it's really easy I'll give you an example if I switch over to my elevation view you can see that my Contours and and my buildings and everything is actually sitting in 3D space so Contours usually come in from an engineer or something in 3D space so in this case it would actually be really easy to accidentally snap a line and have the oh snap to a contour so in this case I would want to maybe double check I would want to go in and double check first so while I'm in here there's two extensions I'm going to show you it's going to help with filling in faces when you work with CAD first one is going to be both of them are actually by enroth for those of you that know n Roth's great extensions the first one is called flattened a plane so what flattened planes going to do it's going to take everything that may be up at an elevation and bring it back down to the same elevation so what's really cool about that is if for some reason I'll give you a better example if I maybe accidentally had a line here and if I looked at it you can see how that line maybe accidentally snapped to a contour well in plan View I have no idea it looks perfect but when I go to fill this face in it's not going to fill in just I don't know why okay that's okay but this not it's not filling in and the reason why is because it's snapped to a contour or something like that so when I select this and I'm going to do this one more time extensions and or off flatten the plane and watch that line right there there it is Bam it's down so now that I've done that now that I've flattened everything it should be pretty easy to select everything and use n Roth's second extension called face creator so I'm going to click face creator and there it is okay now that's basically the entire process here so I I I've got my tags sort of cleaned up regrouped and reassigned I flattened all my geometry and I've gone in and I've made faces automatically using extension so last thing I want to do before I wrap up is I want to switch back to my default style over here I've got a default style maybe I'll turn the axis off turn that off and add a scene maybe call that default I'm not sure I can call that SketchUp I can call that whatever I want drafting working so what's cool about this here is that I can switch back and forth as I'm working I can kind of go back and forth and see my cad View and make sure everything stays organized it's on the right tags and then I can switch back to my SketchUp View and depending on whether um I want to see my faces in SketchUp mode or not I can also just change the background color make that maybe just a little bit darker and there you go so now it's really easy for me to come in and see what's been cleaned up what's been done what has faces and what is ready to extrude in this case in this case it's really easy now for me just to pull these buildings up and just move on to the next piece in my puzzle so I know that was a lot to cover in a short amount of time but actually there's a lot more to say about working with CAD files in fact this is probably a good time for me to plug our course on SketchUp campus so it's right here over my shoulder if you go to learn.sketchup.com you can enroll for free and you can check out here three ways to boost your CAD to SketchUp workflow so some of the tips that I covered we'll do that a little bit more slowly you'll get the exercise files to follow along with and you'll get a whole bunch more information so check that out and before you leave here though make sure to give us a like a comment subscribe if you haven't done already let me know what you think uh these comments kind of help us make these videos better for you so if you learned at least one new thing today that's great let me know and I'll say thank you and see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: SketchUp

Views: 13,050

Keywords: SketchUp, 3D modeling

Id: 7rrWgMea-vc

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023