I’m trying to create a bunch of low poly versions of the HHUS and HGUS series of heavy duty hangers from Simpson Strong-Tie. They do have a few of these hangers in the 3D Warehouse but there are only just a handful of them and to make this useful I really need to get the full series modeled. Additionally, the ones provided by Simpson are far too polygon heavy and are not really usable in their current state, at least not if you want to keep your model lean and mean.
On Simpson’s website it appears they have 3D models that I can use as templates to create dimensionally accurate low poly versions of my own. However it doesn’t appear that one can import any of these three files types directly into SketchUp Pro, unless I’m missing something.
I should note that they also provide accurate DXF/DWG files as well in all three views, so it is possible to generate the geometry from those if required, as I did below for the HGUS412:
However this is a rather time consuming and painstaking process. It seems like it would be much easier if I could somehow import their 3D files and use those as my starting point.
I guess I should have tried the IFC files before I posted this but thank-you for pointing this out.
I’ve downloaded all of the IFC files for the HGUS series (some 45 different hangers) and I am slowly creating low poly versions of them in my spare time between coding.
They are pretty decent but the polycount is still too high and I don’t need all of the detail.
Here is an example of the same hanger imported in from the IFC and then my low poly version, the low poly version is about 100 kb and the IFC version is about 450 kb:
I also don’t like how nested the model is when imported in from IFC, its like seven layers deep of components within components, seems rather silly to me. Not a big fan of the IFC organization system.
If Skimp could remove all the nail holes and other irregularities that would be awesome but I find it easier just to trace the outline and create a new face, essentially start from scratch while maintaining the overall dimensions of everything.
SketchUp regards IFC imports as importing the whole project, there is no option for importing just one buildingelement, which you could then nest in the correct level of the building.
Since there is no other way of making a hierarchy but to just nest components it will always be needed to flatten imports that consists of one element and then nest in on the correct level.
A component is just another SketchUp model.
This is also one of the reasons why the layers in the Trimble Connect viewer don’t work the way they do as in the SketchUp model.
All objects are ‘flattened’ (you don’t need to ‘enter’ an object to dig for the nested objects) but it the containment still resides in the model tree (outliner).
It would be nice if one could choose from templates like ‘Site-template’, ‘building-template’ and perhaps even ‘level-template but definitely ‘buildingelement-template and than the IFC importers (and exporters) would take the template into account.
