Importing 2d DWG files for extruding
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Quite some time ago, here, I believe, I read some instructions on importing 2d dwg files to use as leg patterns to extrude for legs in SU drawings. I downloaded a bunch of these leg silhouettes from a place online and believe that I had been successful in importing and extruding etc. This was in the free version of SU. I downloaded a reader for the dwg files and managed to get them into SU, and make the legs.
Well, I pulled in a pattern in a dwg reader, exported as first jpg, then bmp when the jpg didn't work. Imported the files into a Skippy and couldn't get the pattern off of the background. Anyone know how to do this?
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Why don't you just import the DWG into SketchUp? With the free version of 7.1 you need a plugin to that. I did a blog post some time ago about this although it wasn't here.
SketchUp won't convert the lines in a raster image (JPG, BMP, etc.) into edges. There is software that will but if you have access to the DWG or DXF file, you might as well use one of them.
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Dave,
Do you have any experience with raster-to-vector software? Especially the freeware variety? I've imported a number of jpg files as the beginning of a Sketchup project, and always did the tracing myself, using the line and arc tools, mostly. A very tedious process.
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Hi Tom, the only free raster-to-vector application I've used is called WinTopo Standard which seems to work pretty well. If the image you are starting with is colored (a photo) or very complex, it may be worth spending some time in an image editor adjusting contrast and otherwise simplifying the image before converting it to vector. Keep in mind that the conversion may not make perfectly smooth lines so you may still need to do some work in SketchUp to clean things up.
Dave
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