Importing CAD FILES into SketchUp

what's up guys Justin here with the sketchup's essentials Compaq back with another Sketchup essentials tutorial for you so in today's video we're gonna talk about how to import AutoCAD files and use them to create floor plans inside of Sketchup before we get started today's video is brought to you by plus spec plus spec is a powerful extension for Sketchup specifically designed for professional designers and builders plus spec automates not only the design process but also layers textures shadows scenes and much more everything you draw in plus spec is parametric giving you the freedom to make changes to anything in your model at any time additionally plus spec allows you to create priced material takeoffs and 2d plans learning is easy with inbuilt tutorials that allow you to create 3d models and 2d plans instantly if you're looking for more information about + spec you can check it out at the Sketchup essentials comm slash plus spec now let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so we want to do is we want to talk a little bit about how to bring in CAD files and a little bit about the workflow that you can use in order to generate floor plans from those files and I will note I am using an exported CAD file from something I've drawn in Sketchup the only reason I'm doing that is not cuz I don't want to use other files but because that way I don't have to worry about anybody doing any kind of like copyright infringement or anything like that so it's just easier that way but this will apply to other CAD files as well so the first thing you're gonna do when you want to import a CAD file well I guess the very first thing is this is a pro version feature meaning if you happen to still be using the Sketchup make version from like 2017 or something like that you're not gonna be able to do this I'm just because this is a feature that's always kind of lived in the pro tool set I want to say if you go back to like Sketchup 8 or something like that that could do DWG import but in the newer versions this is something the pro versions do and so what you're gonna do to import a CAD file is you're gonna go up to file and you're gonna do an import and so when you do this you need to navigate to the location that your CAD file shows up and and the very first thing you're gonna have to do when you pop this window up is go down and select the option for AutoCAD files or dot WG or DX so if you do that you have a CAD file in here it should show up so you can see I have several CAD files in here in this case we're going to use my apartment model and before we import this let's click on the button for options and take a look at a couple of these options and so the first three I just pretty much always check so I double check merge coplanar faces murder orient faces consistently depending on what you're doing you might or might not import the materials and then the other thing you want to do and this is really going to depend on what you're doing is you may want to check the box for preserve drawing origin and so you can see how when you click on the box for preserve drawing origin it gives you a little message saying this may cause undesired results so this all has to do with where the origin or the location where the axes intersect are in your CAD file usually you want to check this box if you have a so field like multiple CAD files the reference the same origin you're probably gonna want to check this box so they all come in in the right location for this file it doesn't really matter for me but the other thing is your scale so that's kind of its just a usage dependent thing so if you're bringing in multiple CAD files and they need to all come in in the right location you may want to check this box and then the last option is gonna let you set your scale so feet yards whatever you're using in your model you can go ahead and you can set that right there and we're gonna click OK then once we do that I'm just gonna click the button for import and what this is going to do is this is gonna import all of my different AutoCAD entities so a bunch of different layers and blocks and arcs and all sorts of things like that and there are some things that will get ignored if you actually bring in a file from AutoCAD a lot more things will get ignored I've never actually had this affect me I'm just note that there are some things in CAD that don't really make sense to bring into Sketchup so it doesn't and so we're gonna go ahead we're gonna click the close button we're gonna take a look at what this brings in and so what this brings in for me is this brings in my AutoCAD file which in this case just contained a bunch of edges for my walls and things like that and you're gonna notice that this brought in all of the different layers that were in there as well and honestly I may have some 3d CAD stuff in here as well because I just turned these other layers off we're not gonna focus too much on those for right now I'm just note that your layers will be in here when you bring in a CAD file and some people say that they take the contents of all these layers and they put them on your layer zero and then they start building from them I don't necessarily do that but I don't really have a problem with doing that either there's just kind of a personal preference thing and so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna set my scale because if you notice when I brought this in here's my default model which is actually to scale so this is actually my height in here and you'll notice that this AutoCAD file came in way too big and so what we want to do in order to make this smaller and more realistic is we want to double click inside of this group and we want to reset the scale of this entire group and so the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna double click inside this group and we're gonna go up and use the tape measure tool when we use the tape measure tool we want to set the dimension of something that's known so in this case for me my dimension that's known is the width of my door and so you can see how if I measure this right now this says that my door is 32 feet wide which is obviously too big well we're gonna use the tape measure tool to resize that so if you click on the tape measure tool the first thing you need to do is turn off create guide mode so if you remember the tape measure tool will create guides in here if you have the create guide mode turned on and you can tell that that's on because there's a little dotted line underneath the tape measure but you can tap the control key to turn that off so we're gonna want to make sure that's off so you can see when I tap the control key the little dotted line under my cursor goes away and we're just going to click here and then we're gonna click here and that's going to measure the distance between those two points well now what I want to do if you look at the bottom of the page it says enter value to resize active group or component what that means is I can type in a new value now for what I want the distance between those two points that I measured to be so in this case I'm just going to type in three feet and hit the inner key and it's gonna ask if I want to resize the active group or component and I'm gonna say yes so when I do that what that does is that resizes everything inside this group with the new scale of now this door being three feet wide so now everything's been rescaled so everything kind of makes sense and so the other thing you might have to do depending on the CAD file that you bring in and I'm gonna erase out my default model now I'm depending on the CAD file that you bring in you may need to double click in here and set a new axis or you may need to reset your model axis so that it's aligned along here and I'll link to a video down below with how you can do that but now what we want to do is we want to come in here and we want to start creating our walls and so there's a few different ways that we can do this so probably the most generally accepted way to do this is if you just trace along the edges inside of a CAD file a lot of the time this will just come in here and this will heal the faces in there so that you have a face that you can then push pull up and down so that's probably going to be the simplest way to do this it's not necessarily the easiest and so sometimes some people what they'll do with their CAD files is they'll go outside of the CAD file completely so I'll just hit the Escape key and they'll actually come back in here and just trace over these walls manually so instead of being inside of that group they'll just trace over it like this and just create a whole new wall and a whole new group one of the benefits of doing that is now if I was to do that I could just take this item and I can make that a group and I could just make it a group like the exterior walls or something like that so I could do exterior walls and then I could just go inside of that and just trace out the rest of this model so it is a little bit more work but the benefit is you don't have to deal with any of the weird intersecting geometry that you sometimes get in a CAD file so that's not necessarily what I'm gonna do here for this video in this video I'm gonna go through and I'm going to trace over all of these edges and then later on when we push pull them up it's fairly easy to put them in a group but this is another approach if you want to do it is you can go back in here outside of your ad file group and create a whole new group for your walls but what we're gonna do is we're just gonna start filling in these lines and these edges and I'm not gonna talk too much about it in this video but depending on the kind of CAD file that you have you may want to come in here and select this and use the extension fredo scale in order to scale it down to zero on the blue axis just to make sure everything is a hundred percent flat so all of these edges are on the same plane I don't have a problem with that in this model so I'm not going to get too far into that you can definitely do that but the other and so we're just gonna come in and another way that I've seen people do this is sometimes what they'll do instead of just tracing along every edge is they might come in here and they might draw a rectangle across the face of their model so kind of like this they might draw a rectangle across this face and try to get this to automatically fill in these faces are these walls so that's another way you could do that is you could just draw a rectangle across this you can see how a lot of these do get filled in so that can be a quicker way to do this you do have to be a little bit careful because that can create extra geometry like this piece right here and in a lot of cases this doesn't necessarily fill in the walls but you can use that as a starting point if you want to to kind of fill in some of these walls quickly but what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go back in and I'm just gonna keep tracing these different edges so I'm just going to trace this edge right here and I'm going to speed up this part of the tutorial but you can see how basically I'm just tracing along an existing edge in order to heal a face in so the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here and I'm going to reverse all of these different faces so I'm just gonna select these faces in here you can see I'm just dragging a I'm just dragging a right to left crossing box over these using my selection tool in order to select these faces really quickly but all I'm going to do is just right click on these whoops and I'm just gonna select the option for reverse phases because we want the white face facing outward that's the front face and that's just kind of a good modeling practice to have the white face facing outward not the dark face so that's just gonna be the front face of your model and that's just going to work a little bit better especially if we start exporting to photorealistic rendering programs or something like that but so we're gonna go ahead we're gonna reverse all of these different faces so that the correct face is facing towards the camera and then once we've done that we can use the push/pull tool to start extruding these walls up and so the way that we're going to extrude these walls up is we're just going to use the push/pull tool so I'm just going to tap the P key then I'm going to single click on one of these walls and you can see how I can bring that up really quickly so I've single clicked and now I'm going to type in whatever the height value I want this to be is so let's say I wanted this to be 12 feet I'll just type in 12 feet and hit the enter key and so now we're going to use one of the great features of Sketchup which is the tool memory and so what the tool memory is is the tool memory is the tools and Sketchup remember or at least some of the tools remember the last dimension that they that they used for the last action so what that means is if I double click on this wall it remembers that the last time that it extruded a wall up it did so to a height of 12 feet and so now every single face that I click on in here is going to extrude up to a height of 12 feet because that's what I used before and so I can use that to really quickly come in here and extrude all of these different walls up without having to push pull and type in a value every single time so you can see how I can use this to quickly add my walls inside of my model and so what that's given me is that's given me a whole bunch of different walls inside of this model and I think I'm probably gonna in this video here cuz it's getting a little bit long but maybe in the next video we can talk about some strategies we could use to add the doors and windows and things like that inside of this model so that's from an in this video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought did you find this helpful were there any tips that you use for importing CAD files I just love having that Sketchup conversation with you guys if you like this video please for them to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week feel like I'm doing this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 677,010

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, sketchup tutorial for beginners, autocad (software), sketchup cad file, sketchup cad file import, sketchup cad tutorial, sketchup cad drawing, sketchup autocad, sketchup dwg import, sketchup dwg floor plan, sketchup cad floor plan

Id: c2HDmKFhGWM

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019