Hello , We are a company that sells office furniture , we have our blocks DWG and we want to start using SketchUp , the first problem we found is that the dwg blocks weigh about 600kb and when we turn to sketchup each block grows up to 3.5MB or more , I wish we could help to know how to make the files are smaller . I leave a sample dwg to see the weight block.
Thank you very much
DRC14CPUCC.dwg (743.0 KB)
Hi,
I imported the dwg and was amazed to see that a fairly simple cupboard contained over 19,000 faces.
On closer inspection it seems that the vast majority of these faces are contained in all the various drilled holes for the fixings…completely hidden inside the panels.
I would normally expect a model of that complexity to be only a few hundred faces at most. As some kind of a benchmark, here is something I modelled from scratch in SketchUp a while ago. Although far more visually complex (including mitred edges) it is less than 2000 faces.
http://www.formfonts.com/files/1/17600/the-new-8000-pagewide-printer-hewlett-packard_FF_Model_ID17600_1_main.jpg
Given that the main users for your products on the Warehouse would be architects and interior designers, I can say with absolute certainty that the precise location of all those hidden details would be of absolutely no interest to them…and they wouldn’t be thanking you for all the extra unecessary weight. They just want to be able to place a component in-situ in an interior, see how it fits in; and have it render nicely.
I can fully understand why you might need all that constructional detail in the original CAD files, but it is utterly redundant for the purposes that SketchUp is used for. The best advice I could give you would be to get someone to edit all the files and get rid of all the unseen geometry. If you could simplify some of the details on things like the feet and handles (ie fewer segments on the curves) that would be good too…but not essential, as most of the excess is in those unseen connectors.
I removed the drilled holes and the file has reduced its size in just 125 faces and the file size down from 4.5mb to 123kb .
Thank you so much for your help, it has served me well
File size is but one important aspect of modeling in SketchUp.
Here’s the guide to successful product modeling:
Making a Great 3D Warehouse Model — SketchUp Help
I thought 125 faces seemed a bit low, so I took another look at the imported file. When imported in the correct units (mm) thousands of the faces are so small that they don’t fill in at all…so don’t count as faces, but do count as geometry.
This is especially true of the mitred ends of the handles, the rounded edges of the locks and the foot assembly. Zoom right in and take a look.
I also noticed that there were only feet on the left hand end of the cabinet, leaving the rest to hang in the air. This sometimes happens when importing CAD files using repeated blocks…only the original ones show up. I’m not sure if anything similar has happened with locks, drawer fronts etc.
Anyhow, I have redrawn the cabinet to the kind of Level Of Detail that would be good for the Warehouse; and also replaced the missing feet. It comes out at just over 1000 faces and 191KB.
cabinet.skp (191.1 KB)
Excelent, thank you very much for your help.
