The easy way of converting 2D AutoCAD to 3D Urban Massing in SketchUp

hi there this is ernie from modeler welcome to today's video in which i'll show you how to effectively create 3d messing from your 2d autocad files dxf or dwg we know that many times the process starts by hand sketching importing this to autocad or some similar software to create the 2d floor plans and only then designers start actually forming the 3d shapes by creating the the volumes of the buildings or messing and in today's video i will show you how to do it really effectively using sketchup and modular so with this in mind let's get started the first thing that i will do is i will go here to file and import the autocad file i just need to make sure that i have the autocad files here in my selection for the options i have checked all of the options here the position in of this model is not really relevant so i'm leaving it out and now for the units i'm using meters this is okay and i'll now and now that uh sketchup has import imported the all of those edges i will first get a report of what's been done i see eight layers a few blocks and so on the report looks okay i will just close it i can see that my lines are now in the sketchup model i have my layers here and the first thing that i want to do is i want to do a bit of housekeeping to make sure everything is in place before i continue so the first one that i want to do right now is make sure that the scale is correct i i have just selected the dimension and right now i see that actually this is 20 meters in terms of sketchup space but it should actually be 200 meters so what i'll do is i will just enter this group or the component because the sketchup imports the object as a component and now i can select just specific edges but what i really want to do is i will go to tape measure tool because i want to scale my complete import object to the same size so what i'll do is i'll go to the tape measure tool and pick the first line here and then the last one here it says 20 meters and now what then i when when i've clicked the second point i have an option to just enter 200 m as 200 meters click enter and sketchup will ask me if i want to decide resize everything inside the active group and i will hit yes now all of the object had had been resized to the same scale so right now if i go back and check that if this is correct i can see that this now displays 200 meters uh which is okay the next thing that i want to do is i want to organize my layers a bit so for this i will use the newly added feature of sketchup which is the tech folder which is really effective way of structuring your data so what i'll do in this case is i will just select those layers that represent some of the existing contexts so let me go back here and put them into one folder which will be let's say existing this thing and then for the new buildings and city blocks that i have imported and they are actually those here i will uh add them to the another folder which will be new okay now this gives me a way to quickly just turn on and off groups of layers okay this is done and now the last thing before i start converting actually this to the 3d models is i will actually let me go here here is this one what i'll do is i will also sorry i will also geolocate it so i'll go here to file geolocation add location now this serves two purposes i can later if needed i can export the data to let's say google earth or some other program which requires geolocation and this way i will ensure that my buildings are at correct location and on the other side i can also use the modelers functionality to import openstreetmap buildings to add some context to the to the model so i have already located my model it is in vodma it's part of city of ljubljana i will just go here to select the region digital globe and in here let me just scale this a bit down maybe to something like that hit import and now i have my location set what i'll do now is i will first roughly just move this to the roughly correct location i'm not too worried about getting it completely right because what i'll do now also is i will also import the openstreetmap buildings into my model for this i will just initialize modeler and go here to file import import download openstreetmap 3d buildings what this will do is it will download the data from openstreetmap buildings and generate the the actual 3d buildings out of it so right now it's importing it's done quite quickly so i have my buildings uh in in my model also so that i see what is the actual urban tissue around the development that we are designing now the last thing that i want to do before going into modeler and create the city blocks and buildings i want to match those imported dxf file locations to to the openstreetmap data so for this i will just pick the building that seems to fit quite nice because obviously there is some difference between between the data it comes from different sources but it looks pretty much okay so for for this exercise it's completely enough now now that i have uh geolocated my model i can move forward with actually designing or converting my floor plan layouts to the 3d buildings for this i will just hide the existing buildings or the existing dxf information because i just want to see what is here in my development area because i will go here and erase some of the existing buildings from the openstreetmap data because obviously they will not exist anymore when we will redevelop this area so this way i can easily clean them i will exit it and then i'll just go here and lock also the openstreetmap buildings so that i don't erase anything by accident and now what i'll do is since first thing that i'll do actually is i will turn off the location snapshot because right now it is not needed anymore and i have this way i have a clearer view of my new development and what i'll do now is i will just double click uh on my imported dxf file or the component that comes out of it and i will just select those edges and go here to edit cut escape so that i'm now in the root of my model and back to paste in place what i'm doing right now is i have moved those edges from my component to the root of my sketchup model this way i can just now click specific edges in here still the the layers remain so i can go here to hide the buildings the city blocks and so on but i have them on on the root of my model now one way of creating the buildings would be to just convert those edges to actual faces and then use the sketchup's built-in push-pull tool use maybe four meters as a ground story height and then three meters and so on but this way i i would have quite a lot of work before i create them and still when i want to do some changes it becomes quite tiresome not to mention also extracting the data of course we can see that there is area here and we can put it to excel and then account for that by hand but using modeler all of that is already taken care of so i'll focus on how you can do it using modeler so let me just go here to undo these steps and the same holds true also for the city block so if i go here and just draw another edge on top of this one this built-in functionality of sketchup will fill it with a face which i can then just group and i have something that represents my city block but let's undo this also because right now i want to create those city blocks using the modeler tool or extension so for this i will go to the city block i will select an edge of the city block so let's go with this one and i'll hit create now modeler will automatically create me a ct block in this case if we have the closed edge loop in our selection but keep in mind that there are a few options of how you can create this so and this is this is this can be accessed here through the options buildings from edges if i have an option don't create here when i click the create button nothing will happen and modeler will notify me that it cannot generate the city block on the other hand if i have here also the from edge loop it means that i need to select my complete edge loop so that modeler can actually create a city block or building so right now if i hit create again i get a bit different notification that the complete edge loop needs to be selected so for this reason i can maybe go here and just triple click it so that my edge loop is now selected and when i hit create the city block will be created so i will also do it for this one create and i have my basic city blocks already created now first before continuing to creating buildings i want to change the land use of these city blocks and some of the basic parameters because i know for this area the far can be 2.0 and permitted site coverage can be up to 50 percent but the default land use is not residential but rather service so we have because this is a part of the city of ljubljana where we have hospitals so actually most of these buildings here will actually become some kind of public buildings or even hospitals so now that i have created my city blocks i will also go and select those edges of the buildings here and just quickly convert them to the buildings of uh in using modeler so let me go here to building create again my option here is to have all edges selected so in this case i'll go to from one edge loop and click on the create and i have my buildings already created and now all of these buildings are actually parametric modular buildings meaning that they react to my design moves in sketchup and they also provide me with the data so for the data i'll go here to survey and in this case i'm mostly interested into the city block values so i'll just select the full for the city block and right now i can see that far of this city block is 1.5 meaning that i still have some uh space to to uh to make high to make it higher density for this reason i will just go select this building and actually use the sketchup's built-in scale tool scale this one up to align to the this neighboring building and then modeler will actually add stories to this building and obviously i can add some stories also maybe to this one because i'm still not reaching the far 2.0 now i'm a bit above it but still i can maybe just scale this building a bit down and now i'm at far 2.0 the city block is not red so it's in line with regulations and it seems at least in in the terms of these basic regulations this one is quite okay and then i can do the same with with other city blocks so in here let me go and also change this one maybe use this time using just the parameter change to 6 stories and again i'm at far 2.0 which is at the limit if i make this building a bit taller i will run into troubles modeler will warn me about that so this is actually the the limitation to where i can get to with this one maybe i'll go here make it something like just a two stories and uh then do some further modifications if needed but right now what i see is also that all of the buildings here are actually just a service building so i was talking previously about making them hospitals i will also show you how to do that i will go here to land use i'll start as a with a service as a my basic use from which the hospital will be derived i will hit add type in hospital and i will also change its color so that we can easily easily differentiate different uses of the buildings and i'll hit add and then the primary unit should be changed from office to let's say room and from employee maybe to bed and then i can go ahead and change other parameters so maybe the the average room should be 20 square meters and beds per room maybe two beds per one room should be okay i also can set what should be uh the parking space requirement maybe for the hospitals something like 150 square meters of gross floor area should be good i also have some other options i can set the investment and so on but what i actually want to do right now is just change these two buildings to hospitals so i'll go here change them to hospital you can see that they have changed their color and maybe let's also create a mixed use from this building here so what i'll do is i will just use the ctrl copy command so if i hit ctrl you can see that my object is duplicated right now i'm just copying it above this one i can quickly see that now the far again is succeeded i want to make this building the the bottom part just one story hi and this one actually i will change it to hospital and i will what i'll do next is i will merge these two simple buildings into a complex building of modeler so just click the third button here create complex building which now merges these simple buildings into one complex building maybe the height right now is okay or maybe if i go here to the city block i can see that still regarding the height there is some uh there is still some room so maybe if i want to make this one more of a tower i will actually go here and change this building to maybe five stories so let's see what is current height it's 90 meters still okay but i know that the far right now is succeeded so what i'll do is i will maybe just use the slicer tool to slice part of this building away so let me go here slice it like that and remove it it's not enough again i'll slice some more okay now we have it here and it looks good yeah so with this i will finish this video thank you for watching and stay tuned for more bye bye

Channel: Modelur

Views: 30,158

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Id: Mg7QY0uFjxI

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021