Autocad 2D to SKU 3D

[Philw]

Is there a way to take an Autocad drawing with 2D blocks, imported into Sketchup and have it exchange itself for 3D components with the same name?

Or is there a ruby available?

[numerobis]

Acad blocks will be imported as components. There is no difference in sketchup between "2D" and "3D"-components, so what you are asking for is to automatically replace one component by another one with the same name, which will not be possible. Or a special dwg importer that exchanges all imported components with pre defined ones in the scene. I'm not aware of such a plugin.
I don't know how many different block need to be replaced, but you can do it manually in a relatively quick way. You can simply select all instances of a component (right click>instances>select all)
Then you open the component browser, select the new component, right click>replace selected.
But the origin of the two components need to be in the same place, otherwise you need to move the content of the component later. So you will have to define the origin of the block in acad - as far as i remember the automatically generated origin is the acad 0,0,0.

[Philw]

Thanks for the reply,
I seem to remember back I the @Last days that if you brought in a Component and a component exist in the drawing you had an option to swap for the SKU Component. But I have not needed it till now and might have been it just picked the latest version and asked a questions to swap or not….

But you’re right I can do a swap once the blocks are converted, I was hoping that there was a faster way to do this by now. And yes autocad will default to 0,0 unless you pick local when creating the block.

[sdmitch]

@philw said:

Thanks for the reply,
I seem to remember back I the @Last days that if you brought in a Component and a component exist in the drawing you had an option to swap for the SKU Component. But I have not needed it till now and might have been it just picked the latest version and asked a questions to swap or not….

But you’re right I can do a swap once the blocks are converted, I was hoping that there was a faster way to do this by now. And yes autocad will default to 0,0 unless you pick local when creating the block.

I think this is doable. It is essentially what I did in my Component Replacement plugin. You only need to assign a different definition name to convert a Component Instance.

If you could post or PM me a sample "2d" model to test that would be helpful.

[Philw]

I'll PM it to you from my office and let you know what we are looking for.