Import CAD plans and elevations into SketchUp TUTORIAL

I'm going to show you how to import CAD elevations and plans into SketchUp so you can build a 3D model from them so everything in this video is actually from my book SketchUp to layout second edition you can find it on Amazon or you can use the link in the description below to get the ebook for free when you buy the paperback so let's take a look at the cad file we're going to use in this example so we just have a basic uh four elevations and three floor plans we have the basement here the first floor the second floor and then we have each elevation so this can import into SketchUp really easily there are certain entities that won't be imported they'll just be ignored so that's going to be any text and dimensions and things like that now as far as like the type of cleanup that you need to do before you import a cad file it's kind of up to you but I would say the most important thing is to make sure that you're drawing accurately in CAD before bringing it into SketchUp because SketchUp is going to be a hundred percent accurate so even if you have Dimensions set to round up to a certain interval in CAD SketchUp is going to actually read the true Dimension so just looking at some quick Dimensions here we do have some measurements that are not really pinned to a whole number so you know two feet two and thirteen sixteenths and this is actually rounded in CAD so this isn't exactly to the 16th of an inch then we have other instances where it is accurate you know it says half inch so for the half inch sheetrock that's measured accurately there's certain measurements that are you know two foot eight for the door things like that so I'm going to show you as we import this into SketchUp how some of these discrepancies C's can cause problems in SketchUp so this is a real world example it's not a perfect CAD file but let's go ahead and import it into SketchUp so I'm going to go ahead and open up a new SketchUp model and I always recommend this whenever you're importing CAD you want to start from a blank model even if you've already started the project you want to start from a blank SketchUp model so to import CAD you're going to go to file import we'll select the cad file now if you don't see the cad file here just make sure you have either all supported types selected here or the specific AutoCAD file type selected right here because otherwise it just won't show up in the list if you don't have that so I'm going to select this one here and under options there are a few different options you can toggle so merge coplanar faces Orient faces consistently importing materials I don't recommend preserving the drawing origin if you're just importing a building or something like that this does become more important if you're trying to coordinate multiple CAD Imports on like an entire project site where you need to kind of maintain that origin every time you import something but for just a single building I would recommend leaving that unchecked and also most times selecting model units is going to be the best way to import a your CAD file and have it scale accurately so we can just leave it like that so we'll click OK we'll click import it'll have a progress bar depending on how big the cad file is it might take a little while and then we have the results so just looking at this really quick you can see the certain entities that were ignored and which ones were imported so once we click close it'll load and we have the cad file imported now you can see just judging off of the scale figure down here that it looks like it was imported to scale but you'd always want to check it you you don't want to just trust that it's built to scale and you start modeling and then you realize everything's off so to check that you just grab the tape measure tool right here or tap t on your keyboard for the keyboard shortcut and then you can just measure any known distance so this I know is a 2x6 wall so I can see that it's five and a half inches so it was imported correctly but again if your CAD file isn't trustworthy or you you're not sure how accurate it was you do need to just kind of maybe check a couple of places and and just make sure that it's imported the way you want it all right so before we start moving and arranging this into place let's just take a look at how SketchUp has imported this information so if we open the outliner panel here which if you don't see any of these panels I mentioned you can just go to window default tray and enable them right here so we can see we have two components in our model currently so the default scale figure right here which I'll delete and the cad file right here is automatically converted into a component and then under that is everything that was imported so in this case the cad file is made up of entirely just loose entities with the exception of this scale figure block so blocks get converted into SketchUp components and we can see we have the scale figure in a few different places here now one quick tip I do have a keyboard shortcut shift s and that is zoom selected and so you can find that in the edit menu if you go to edit component and zoom selection so I have a custom keyboard shortcut assigned to that I find that really helpful because you can click on something in the outliner panel and then just tap shift s and it'll Zoom right to that object you can also actually find that right here if you right click on the object in the outliner panel you can go Zoom selection so we have several of these blocks that were converted to components but other than that everything is loose entities now curves will be converted into either arcs or Circles of course everything in SketchUp is segmented so you're not going to have a true curved entity it's going to be made up of a circle or Arc or curve entity in SketchUp now what about layers so layers get imported and converted into tags and and we can actually visualize how this was imported a little bit better because tags do have color assignments here and we can click color by tag now initially you might think okay that didn't work because everything's still black but that's because the current style we're using has the edges so if I go to style the Styles panel edit click on edges here and you go down here to color you'll notice that the style currently has all edges being colored the same so this is all same so I can change this to a different color and now all the edges are going to change to this color now there's another option in this drop down menu by material so if I select buy material now you'll see that because we have color by tag enabled the material color is overridden by the tag color and in return since we changed the edge color to the by material all the edges show the corresponding tag now if we take a quick look at some of these floor plans we can see that the cad file isn't really well organized we have some entities that are on one tag but then we have other entities of the same type that are on just the one tag so in this case you know the tags aren't going to be super helpful for us just because the cad file wasn't really organized that well when it was created so there's two things you can do if you want to you can select all of the imported tags right click delete and then just assign all of those entities to the untagged or basically remove the tag assignment from all of those entities but another option that might be better is to just select all of them and then Nest them into a tag folder and so we can call this CAD import now down the road if you import another CAD file all of those tag assignments will just be inherited and nested in this folder for you okay so let's go ahead and reset the style and start organizing these floor plans and elevations so we can start building the model the first thing you'll want to do is create groups around each one of these so I have a keyboard shortcut for shift G to create groups so I'm just clicking and dragging with the select tool to create a selection box over each one of these and shift G to make the group now another thing I'm going to do real quick is just change the camera angle to parallel projection and standard view top just so everything is aligned and we'll group the rest of these now this I think is the roof Edge perimeter we might not use that but uh we'll just leave it there for now now at this point what you want to do is move and rotate each of the floor plans and elevations so they kind of wrap around where you're going to be building the model so let's go ahead and start with the floor plans so I'm going to grab this basement plan and just kind of Bring It closer to the origin and I'm going to just grab these as well so M for the move tool click once click again just to get it closer and we'll want to label the floor plans as well we're going to label the elevations eventually as well but right now I don't really know for sure which elevation is which so I'm going to just leave those unlabeled at this point so I know this is the basement so I'll just call this the basement and then this one is going to be the first floor and this is going to be important when we start stacking and arranging these it's going to be different difficult to know what we're selecting so we can go to the outliner panel and have a better idea of which group we're actually selecting okay so now we want to find a common corner or point between these two floor plans in order to align them vertically so I'm going to pick this corner right here and you want to make sure you're zooming in to make sure you're you know selecting the precise point you know I don't want to select the sheathing I want to select the framing or you know it doesn't matter which one you select you just need to be consistent and make sure you know you're selecting the right one each time so I've got the move tool I've got the first floor selected and I'm going to click right there to start the move and then I'm going to zoom out and bring it right down to the basement right here and so you can see how everything aligned and everything is looking pretty good so I'm just going going around and kind of double checking to see if we have any misalignment so it looks like we might have a misalignment right here on this wall I'm going to leave it there for now and just take a look at some of these other walls and so I'm just hiding and unhiding the first floor to just see how it compares to the basement all right so now we're gonna go and do the same thing with the second floor so this is the second floor right here we'll go ahead and name that second floor and I'm going to grab well now I have this issue because I don't have that outside corner so let me let me see if we can align this corner right here so we'll zoom out we'll come down to this corner right here and drop that right in place all right now I'm just going to temporarily Elevate each of these plans to an arbitrary number just to get some sort of separation between each one and then once we get the elevations in place we'll find the exact level that they need to be at so I'm going to switch back to perspective camera angle and I'll grab the first and second floor I'll grab the move tool click once to start the move tap the up Arrow to lock the blue axis click again and type in 10 foot enter and then I will select just the second floor this time and do the same thing and we'll just go another 10 feet enter so now we have each plan separated they're contained in their own group and they're labeled so we know which one is which and now we just need to bring the elevations over so I'm going to select all of these and just bring them over like this and we can rotate all of these up in one move so since they're all selected we can grab the rotate tool and we'll click and drag to orient the red axis then we'll click once we'll bring it up to 90 degrees and click again and then you just take each one of these individually and rotate and move them into position so this one is going right here on this face so I'll grab the move tool I'll bring it over and the move tool has these rotation grips kind of built right into groups and components so you can just grab one of those little red grips and rotate a group or component so let's go ahead and do that for each one of these I'm just placing them kind of arbitrarily for right now all right so we have them placed kind of arbitrarily right now and the next step is to choose one elevation that you want to become kind of your Keystone Master reference elevation uh that you can align the other elevations and floor plans too so I'm going to pick this elevation right here and we're going to start by getting it aligned to the basement so we can hide the first and second floor if we want just to kind of make it easier to identify things and we're basically going to work one axis at a time it doesn't matter which one you start with you're going to do the height with the blue axis you're going to do the green axis and the red axis so I'm going to grab the move tool I'm going to click the side of the foundation here and move this along the green axis and snap it to the floor plan here and for the height we'll go ahead and grab this elevation Mark right here here which if we look back at the cad file we can see this elevation has these Marks here for the different for the different floor Heights so we can see this line in SketchUp for the finished lower level so if we go back to SketchUp we could see this one right here is the finished basement level so for the height we'll go ahead and snap to that so now what we can do is select the elevation on the opposite side of the building and we can find a common point between those two and align them with each other so I'm going to align that elevation with this wall right here and we can use the ridge to align the height so I can snap to this one right here and then we just do the same thing with the other two elevations and then to finalize the floor plan Heights we can refer back to this original elevation we'll unhide the second floor and then we'll move this to snap to this elevation marker right here or actually that was this is the first floor the second floor goes up here and the first floor goes down here all right and so once you have this set up you can rename the elevations as you please and you can kind of double check everything make sure it's aligned properly and again if you have a cad file that's you know not a hundred percent accurate that's going to show up in the model so you're going to have to you know make those decisions on how you want the final model to be dimensioned and you're going to have to work with what you have so that's going to do it for this video again if you want to purchase my book SketchUp to layout second edition it covers all of basically everything we talked about in this video is native SketchUp tools so we talked about working with Dimensions creating different types of selections moving and rotating objects so this is going to cover all of the basics in SketchUp and go into layout as well so again you can find it on Amazon or you can use the link in the description go to sketchuptolyout.com and you can get the paper back and get the ebook as a free bonus so that's going to do it for this video thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: MasterSketchUp

Views: 15,000

Keywords: Sketchup Tutorials, Sketchup, Google Sketchup, Trimble Sketchup, Sketchup Tips, sketchup tutorial, sketchup

Id: Z0BieaGnAwY

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022