DWG troubles

tbih

I'm having a heck of a time with this. I just recently started using SketchUp for production work. I use clients' AutoCAD drawings as a reference to build models from. The problem is that I can't properly view the DWG files. I'm using AutoCAD's free DWG TrueView (I don't have AutoCAD) and can see that, for example, the elevations are setup on a model sheet called "Elevations". The sheet called "Model" is unusable to me. The problem seems to be that SketchUp doesn't offer an option as to which model sheet to import - it just imports the sheet called "Model" by default. And TrueView doesn't seem to offer any options to change sheet names or whatever. It's mostly just for viewing DWGs.

So, I'm stuck. I can see the elevations in TrueView, but can't import them into SketchUp for actually using. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Michael

Chris Fullmer

In autocad, "sheets" are just ways of showing the information in the "model" space. (that's not exactly true, but it is typically true). So whatever is shown on a sheet, is probably modeled in the model space. So all you should need is from the model space, including the elevations.

I'm a cad user and I take cad into SU fairly often. I can't imagine doing it without owning CAD though. I do quite a bit of cleanup work in autocad before exporting the files for use in SU. I guess with enough work and patience you might be able to figure out a solid workflow where CAD is not needed.

You might consider buying autocad LT. Its cheaper and could probably do everything you would need.

tbih

Thank you. I get what you are saying. I had been using a very outdated version of Microstation but was hoping to move to something more up to date with less overhead and easier to use (for renderings). I assumed that between SketchUp and Layout, I would have no need for a "real" CAD program. So I'm disappointed that I still need to keep Microstation in my workflow for now. Until maybe Layout can import Autocad? Would be nice.