Working drawing detail elev from SU scene

Anssi

Hi Anssi, How do you get individual sections, and 2d scenes (plans, interior or exterrior elevations) from SU to ACAD?

I export 2D DWGs. I tried Didier's PageExIm.rb, but it messed with the section planes, so I found it good only for exterior elevations.

Anssi

wmanning

I love threads like this. It's good to see how people work, but more importantly it would be great to hear how you want it to work, and how best we can streamline your workflow. Things like section support, partial load Xrefs for scenes, and other items are on our radar screen already.

Thanks,
William

wbarch

Have you guys looked at the basecamp videos by Mitchel Stangl?

(http://sites.google.com/site/3dbasecamp2008/)

Seems like this has come the closest (that I've found so far) toward describing a workflow in ACAD.

The DoubleCAD option looks interesting too though - It would be interesting to post a sample working drawing page showing what can be created with SU and DoubleCAD. In my own experience with ACAD, I've ended up importing the SU model via plug-in and then drawing over it again in ACAD to get clean lines.

I would suspect the layer structure in SU should mirror something akin to Revit, e.g. objects are put on layer categories like "walls, doors, windows, annotations, structural framing, etc"

wb

3rd stone

What is 2CD PRO?
Use the section plane and scene,don't forget to active cut and update scene.

watkins

Dear William,

I think Forum members would appreciate a video tutorial showing how DoubleCAD can be used with Sketchup, and specifically the work flow from 3D model to 2D drawings. There could be more than one video showing different aspects of the work flow.

The work would not be wasted as the videos could then be posted on YouTube, thus reaching a wider audience.

Kind regards,
Bob

honoluludesktop

2CD Pro beta is "DoubleCad XT Pro" that I am evaluating. It is a Cad program that interfaces with SU in two ways. One way is to insert a SU.skp into a 2CD production worksheet as a xref. This procedure allows changes to the model by SU to be updated in the 2CD xref. Information regarding SU scenes is not involved in this process.

The other process 2CD offers is to directly open a SU.skp, which creates a worksheet for each SU scene. The scene's viewports can be cut, paste, and edited into a production worksheet. At present, in this process, the revisions in the SU.skp scenes is not updated in 2CD.

Presently, you have two choices: update 2CD database without SU scenes, or no update to 2CD database with SU scenes.

The value of the program is to provide a way to access a SU model by another Cad program, in the manner that production drawings. In addition to many other formats, 2CD can read/write SU files, and read/write ACad files. My purpose for posting here was to get comments from Architects, and other SU users regarding design to production drawing work flow, to help my evaluation.

Anssi, or others, have you tried to use a "aligned", "parallel projected", scenes, with selected layers off, as interior elevations?

linea

William, Honolulu
It would be good to see a video that shows the SU > DoubleCAD proposed best practice. And then a "but this is what you can do" video for the pro version. I think I have a pretty good SU > AutoCAD/ProgeCAD workflow but I'm hoping DoubleCAD has some tricks up it's sleeves.

Is 2CDpro a public beta? If so I'll take a look.

jon

wmanning

Thanks for the feedback guys. We are working on a video for SketchUp to DoubleCAD and hope to show a bit of the workflow.

With the free product just released we have a few plusses and minuses. The negatives are that when we bring in the views we didn't respect hidden line or Parallel Projection view styles, so for each viewport they need to be converted (and we'll fix this asap -- as to whether it is fixed in the Pro v1.0 release coming up I don't yet know). The positives are that we create a view and a paperspace with a view for each scene and we do respect the layer visibility by scene (as opposed to the DWG or DXF exports I bring into AutoCAD).

With the Pro version we will be adding the ability to Xref a .skp file, and we have additional features that create associative standard views, hatched sectional views, and more. What we don't have today is an integration of the two methods, so that an individual scene could be updated in SU and updated in DoubleCAD, and our Xrefs could still be made much more robust.

The Pro version is not currently a public beta. It is nearing release (for the v1.0 at least), but if you are interested in beta participation, not just evaluation, let me know and I can talk to the product manager. (wmanning @ imsidesign.com)

Now, back to the video...

-- William

utiler

Thanks William and everyone. I am very interested in this SU/DoubleCAD collaboration; it is what I have wondered [and been frustrated with!!!] for some time....
Downloading XT for a look.....

wmanning

Been so busy I forgot we were going to create a video or two on the workflow for this thread. Dropped the ball, sorry... I'll get on this, as the one we have on our web site doesn't go into too much depth. But you can see that one here if you like: http://downloads.imsidesign.com/Flash/DoubleCADFlash/Import-From-Sketchup-800-600/Import-From-Sketchup-800-600.htm

William