Is there a way to smooth the terrain (non-triangulated)?
I just imported a Revit Topo file (DWG) into Sketchup. Everything looks good except it's "too triangulated."

Any setting I can tweek before or after importing the DWG file?

I just imported the google earth terrain into the sketchup.
It's a terrain 2d surface.

What's the best way to make it into a 3d terrain solid? So that I can calculate how much earth it needs to get excavated (cut and fill calculation)?

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I still don't quite understand how this actually works.
The tricky thing is that I will be receiving this type of file in a weekly basis. So it got to be something easy and fast to break it down repeatly in the same manner. I know how to do this in FormZ pretty easily. I still don't quite understand how it works in SketchUp. See the attached file. Or if somebody can do a little quick Jing presentation that would be great, thanks.

3d model

What about if I have a pipe that goes continuously from G/F all the way to the top floor? How can I separate it into different layer? Do I have to physically "break" it?

I have a model with 9 floors of continuous plumbing pipes and mechanical ducts.
What's the quickest way to break it down so they are divided into 9 different floors?

This is what I usually do in FormZ:
I have the design with 4 different options. I save them as 4 different files. But I can render these files at the same time with the same view orientation. I wish you can do things like in SketchUp but I guess you can't.

When you mentioned the animation, what's the best software in your opinion to create like a "flipbook" animation by inserting different rendered images as the frames in the animation?

Is there a way you can setup multiple scenes from mulitple files to be rendered at the same time?

In FormZ, there's a thing called "Imager". You can setup the number of files with the saved views to be rendered. So you can do this before you sleep and pick up the rendering next day morning. I'm just curious if Sketchup or the VRay plugin would allow something like this.

Thanks in advance.

No problem. I'll give it a try.
Do you have this tutorial in a screencast or something that's video based?

Is there a way I can email you the file and have you take a look at it?
I can't upload the file in here because it's a 10mb file, thanks.

My email is:
diesellam[at]gmail.com

Thanks once again.

Thanks for the tutorial.
I still don't quite understand how this works. How do you cut the hole of the terrain with the footprint of the building.

Where can you get the "volume" plugin?