I was put right in a post recently when I assumed you could not export from LO to DWG. I have just tried to do just that and have hit a snag. There doesn’t seem to be an option drop down menu. I can export to PDF only.
Is it cos I is Mac?
Here’s a screenshot of what I see:
Partly. It’s because of the way the export window works in LayOut. My Mac is being recalcitrant at the momemnt so I can’t make a screen shot but I think you need to click the up arrow to the right of Save as: at the top of your screen shot. (this is from fuzzy memory) Then you should be able to set the file type.
Edit: Happily, my memory isn’t as fuzzy as I was afraid it might be. Click that up arrow and then, at the bottom you’ll see “Format” where you can change to the DWG export format.
I’m not Mac based, so this is a guess:
Perhaps it’s an option under the huge “Options …” bottom of the file list?
Uh… No. Nice try. Thanks for playing.
That’s nailed the pesky little so and so. Thanks again, Dave. As usual riding to the rescue of this “damsel” in distress!
Whoa there Sir Lancelot, it worked but not quite as well as I hoped. Look what I got:
Cool! It’s art!
It seems to me that text thing was reported before but I disremember the solution. I’ll see if I can find the thread.
Maybe this is the thread:
Thanks.
I have just sent the DWG to a colleague. He said: “It didn’t work. I can see text and references to png files.”
Getting a seamless transfer from LO to a DWG with things in Paperspace and Modelspace as you would expect seems to be a bit of a Holy Grail (see what I did there?).
I did see what you did there.
I’m not sure about the idea of exporting images with DWG files. I think of them more as the vector stuff. What is your colleague going to do with your file once he gets it?
Hi all, a few things on this topic. A bug was introduced with 2018 with multi-line text and tables so it is a bit different than the Model Space / Paper Space discussion described in that thread.
Tables:
If the table is exploded before the export the text and format of the table will be closer to what it was in LayOut.
Multi-line Text:
This one will export large as we do not have a way to explode it to single line text, but once in Acad or other, selecting the text one can edit the height.
If your colleague is only seeing text and png files, make sure that your SketchUp model viewports are Vector or Hybrid rendered. We did add a option to the export dialog to ‘Export raster rendered SketchUp models as Hybrid rendered’.
Hope this helps
Which thread?
I think this is the problem I encountered.
They were indeed raster rendered. I have changed to my default hybrid (not sure why they weren’t that already) and will try again.
The problem with multiline text size in SketchUp exports is that the size is set in character formatting, so changing the properties of the multitext container in AutoCad has no effect on the actual displayed text size. Character formatting should be used only when the text entity contains text in different styles.
@simoncbevans this was the link [REQ] Export to DWG with correct CAD formatting for texts - #2 by trent
I was referring to and it might apply if the text was made in SketchUp vs only LayOut. Anssi’s comment is spot on. We have another issue where SketchUp text with a fixed is passed to LayOut and is then hardcoded with that hight on export.
I don’t often use text in SU as LO is the proper place for annotations and dimensions for what I do. Even in LO, I don’t consciously do much text formatting either. I do use multiline text and I do sometimes change the font size, but that’s about it. I haven’t looked closely enough at my exported DWG file to understand why the text that was enlarged became so un-WYSIWYG but perhaps I should to understand better what I might do to prevent it happening in future.
I have just looked at the conversion done after changing my rendering to Hybrid. I still get the enlarged text (as expected, but I notice that I also get text references to the viewports reporting them as PNGs (this doesn’t show in the LO drawing). But if you go into Modelspace, it does look like vector geometry.
I may well still be doing something wrong but it really isn’t working well for me.
Here’s what I get:
Working.dwg (228.6 KB)
During export, a folder is created with PNGs. It’s named for the LO file and appended with .image.
That begs a whole raft of new questions such as:
What this all boils down to is that if you want to export a DWG of a LO file, you have to do quite a bit of tidying up before you send it if it’s going to look professional. Is that right?
That sounds like a question for @trent although I’m guessing those PNGs could get used with the vector export in some way. Maybe imported into AutoCAD to provide the colors and textures.
This one I can answer. It ends up in the directory where the DWG file is saved.
Maybe to let you know what file to look for if you need it.
I have little need for DWG exports from LO but I guess if I were going to make them and all I want is the geometry, I would set up scenes in SU using Hidden Line and no background so it’s just lines in LO. Then I would turn off the text layers before exporting. But that’s just me.
