Plugin to quickly close (make faces) the imported CAD lines

onzki

Note: I often use the word "close(d)" line to denote a Sketchup "Face"

Imported CAD lines are notorious for having tiny gaps and roughly segmented arcs / circles. I know that this has been a common issue and I hope you can help me find some information. My boss wants me to find plugins to quickly close the line imported from CAD because so far- this part takes time in our workflow since we often make landscape master plan- lots of lines from paving bandings, etc. (Hatch patterns are excluded)

My current workflow after DWG import is:

Using the Flatten plugin
Work out each area manually whichever was left open.

Right now, I'm gonna try Smustard's Close opens, intersect overlaps and extend close lines. If you know other alternatives, I really appreciate your suggestions. Thanks!

Krisidious

Why do you flatten the geometry? you might use Tigs extend to face tool to get a quick clean set of flat lines. And Thomthom's clean up tools will do you well for cleaning up geometry. And then Thomthom's edge toolswill also help a lot.

Now about that geometry... are you getting 3d topographical maps? point data? could you give us a sample?

onzki

@krisidious said:

Why do you flatten the geometry?
Now about that geometry... are you getting 3d topographical maps? point data? could you give us a sample?

Thanks for the reply Krisidious, I'll try those scripts that you mentioned. About geometry, I'm only using 2D CAD plans. I'll attach a screenshot below. It shows the progress right after I applied the flatten plugin. For the plan's scale, the tree you see is about 6 Meters in diameter. You'll notice that I still got a long way to go, to close in the lines to form faces.
I need these faces so I can model and texture the site. For the past two years, this has always been my bottle neck part. The vertical components like trees, pole lights, bollards, etc. are easily prepared through CAD blocks. It's just the main surface or should I say "platform" that takes a lot of time.

I'm open to any suggestion to change my workflow if that would improve the speed. Right now, I'm currently geared into 1. Create faces 2. Model 3. Texture.
Thanks!

Krisidious

Blocks and Layers... are you exploding the entire autocad file once imported in SU? Blocks will come in as components or groups and can normally be turned off. You might also play with separating the file into different imports via the layer controls in Autocad. or deleting geometry and saving it as a separate cad file and then doing that again with more geometry... this will make things easier because of the intersecting of SU, if all these things are exploded they will cut each other and then make creating faces a pain.

onzki

@krisidious said:

Blocks and Layers... are you exploding the entire autocad file once imported in SU?

Most of the repeating elements such as trees and lighting are already in blocks. I'm just wondering why closed polylines in CAD isn't automatically converted into faces after import. Because of this, I still have to find and connect faces for most of areas that's why I looked for such plugin. Thanks for your suggestions.