I’ve been using Sketchup for 8 months now, but diving more into the program and love it! What is the best approach to converting jpeg, pdf files for Sketchup? I deal with a lot of PDFs or jpegs with my projects and do not get the luxury of getting clean files. Do I have to scale the file when I import it, then explode the file and then delete the lines for elevations, siding, measurements, etc.? I’ve watched Linkedin learning videos which are very good by the way, but they seem to never dive into the preparation for converting or cleaning up plan files for import. Their DXF files are always clean and to scale. I figured this would be a great place to turn because my googling and youtube has pointed me to the community!
Share an example JPG file that shows us what you are working with. Generally a JPG is a raster image while dxf and dwg files are vector files. There are some converters out there that can trace the pixels in a jpg file and create vector lines in .dxf format that you can then import into SketchUp. In my experience with that sort of thing the resulting vector file is rarely good enough to use to create a 3D model from directly.
Some pdf files might contain vector data. You can use an application such as Inkscape to extract that as a .dxf file which you can import into Sketchup.
Andrews-Heights-1_2-elevation.dxf (2.4 MB)
It doesn’t surprise me with that image. There should be a real vector file for that somewhere, though. Can you get it? If not I think your best option would be to import the JPG into SkethUp as an image and use it as a reference to make the 3D model.
Thanks for the reply! I usually get sent a PDF of the plans then I convert what I need to DXF, but lately I’ve just modeled off jpegs and it works pretty good for layouts but when it comes to roofs and pitch it seems to be a little more taxing.
You should be able to figure out the pitch fairly easily. The dormer roofs appear to have a 10:12 pitch.