Illustrator to SKP to DWG = Lots of lines...
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Hi All
Very, very new to Sketchup so please bear with me...
I am trying to make a .dwg file to give to a laser cutter to cut out of sheet steel. I have drawn it first in Illustrator (I have experience with this) and know that the exported DWG out of Illustrator is no good for my laser cutters. So I have imported it into Sketchup to see if it would produce better results.
The laser guy is still saying he is getting too many lines. Apart from re-drawing does anyone know of a nice work around to get dwg files that have small line counts for laser cutting using Sketchup? Or has had any joy with using Sketchup dwg's for laser cutting? I don't have access to Autocad...
Please let me know if you need more info, I have attached a pdf to show what we are making.
Thanks in advance for your help
Mark
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Could you post the SKP file? I don't see any excess of lines in the PDF. It's hard to tell what you're getting and how they might be dealt with without seeing the real thing.
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Hi Dave
Thanks for your response, the PDF is out of Illustrator. I will put the sketch up file up after the weekend as it is on my office computer. The file looks good in sketch up but the guy who is doing my cutting says there are too many lines for the cutting software....
Have a good weekend everyone...
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What the guy probably means is that there are too many line segments on the curves after bringing your ai file into SketchUp. SU can't deal with bezier curves, so it will reproduce all those curves as a series of straight lines. If this is done by straight exporting the default settings will probably result in 10,000s of tiny line segments along those curves.
To be honest, if the cutter can deal with beziers, you are probably better avoiding SU altogether and finding some other way of achieving a dwg file that is acceptable.
If you have to go through SU, then what you'll need to do is edit the curves in Illustrator. You'll need to add tons more anchor points to the curves and then turn the curves into straight lines before export.Obviously there is a trade-off between the number of anchor points and the resulting smoothness of the curve (which is no longer a curve but a series of straight line segments), but it shouldn't be too difficult to add enough extra anchor points to produce what seems to still be a real curve...yet still have far fewer lines than your current method of exporting to SU...perhaps an order of magnitude fewer.
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I agree with Alan, you should skip Sketchup.
While I have laser-cut from Sketchup DWG's, the segments were all broken like yours and I had to join them in Corel before sending to the laser which is an extra step you may be able to save by figuring out the problem with Illustrator's DWGs. Can the laser cutter take an SVG or other file that Illustrator can export?
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Hi Ben, hi folks.
It may prove to be simpler to do it all using SketchUp. Doing this simple design might prove a good way to learn the software. In the following example, I used the default 24 segments for circles and ellipses and 12 segments for arcs. Using more may yield a better result. The completed figure comprise 1608 edges. Using something like 96 edges for the larger circles would set the count to 1896 which is not much. Even quadrupling everything from this value would yield 7584 edges (circles and ellipses with 384 segments and arcs with 48 segments). Maybe this would be OK for CNC machines.
See this SU file for ideas.
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