I’ve been researching all day about how to get an ESRI Multipatch file (ArcGIS) into Sketchup. Washington DC has a model available to download (Box) but it is a zip file with a bunch of different formats that are made for GIS software. Just curious if anyone knows how to import or convert these files into a more common 3D format without having to purchase ArcGIS?
…and yes I’ve already tried Jim Hamilton’s Spirixcode plugin for shapefiles, but it doesn’t work and he mentioned in another thread that it doesn’t read multipatch files.
Qgis is free and might load those files, too.
https://www.qgis.org/nl/site/forusers/download.html
Than extract the layers that you need, one by one as .shp files and use the spirix extension to load in SketchUp
2 Likes
Mike,
Thanks for the suggestion. Qgis is free and does read the Esri Shapefiles, but sadly doesn’t seem to read z height. They have a new 3D Map View, but you can see here that all of the shapes are flat. Not sure if you have seen or know if there is a way to get the height information?
In their stackexchange forum it also mentions that Qgis cannot manage z information:
Thanks,
-Jon
…so close. I was actually able to export a DXF from the main 2D project window in Qgis (New 3D View is just a raster plane for some reason). When I imported the DXF into Sketchup all of the roof lines retained their height data! …but sadly are just lines. I can use these as a guide at least, but would be awesome to get the full 3d volume like seen in the image at bottom on the DC 3D Zoning Web Viewer (DCOZ 3D Zoning Map)
1 Like
Your dataset is all off the rooftops, so you’re missing the physical buildings. What is also necessary is that you select a part of the area in QGis and save it as a new shapefile (because the total dataset is too big to import in one go).
Via the tool of T4SU see the link below:
https://t4su.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Introduction.html
You can then import the newly created shapefile into SketchUp.
Good luck.
1 Like