Layout: Please add a toggle to remove hidden geometry edges from Exports to DWG and PDFs

[ArchyVR]

Hello,

I’m exporting my Layout drawings to DWG for my structural engineer.

I noticed the file exports were rather large and it seems to be because all of the hidden geometry of curved shapes gets included.

Visually a PDF export does not do this, so I thought I could convert that using Inkscape into a DXF, but to my surprise, the exported DXF also showed the hidden geometry.

I finally realized that even the PDF has this hidden geometry there, just with white lines so you don’t see it. This explains in part why my PDF files tend to be rather large in terms of MB.

Is there anyway to either in SketchUp proper, or with a Plugin or other third party software to remove these hidden geometry line work from both my DWG/DXF exports and PDF exports.

My engineer and other consultants would be very happy to receive clean DWGs and smaller PDFs from me.

Thanks

[JQL]

I’m with you on this one!

This has annoyed me since forever!

However, I’ve been told that this is by design. I can’t see how it can be by design.

We wouldn’t even need a toggle in Layout.

If hidden geometry is toggled off in the SketchUp style, if you don’t see it in Layout, then why would we suddenly need it to show in DWG export, without a means to remove it?

If, by any unknown reason that I can’t think of, we’d want these soften geometry to show in the export, we’d just have to turn it on in our SketchUp style settings. Then Layout would only have to honor that.

[ArchyVR]

You are right JQL, it would be better that export is in the spirit of WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)

On trying to figure out a workaround, I noticed Inkscape with a right-click lets me mass-select all the hidden geometry that shares the same stroke and fill, this then lets me delete all that geometry in one step. (I had to wait a minute or two to process)

This cut my Inkscape DXF export from 36 MB to 21 MB… which is still large for the actual level of detail that I have. I think the reason the file is still huge is that Layout breaks every line at every intersection, easily making the file 5 to 10 times larger than it needs to be with all the segmented lines.

Now I’m trying to figure out if there is a plugin or third party app that can join and weld these segments.

Any tips/advise is appreciated.

I’ll post my final workflow workaround solution once I figure it out. Being that Inkscape is Open source, maybe someone with some programing skills could incorporate some aspects of that and come up with a CleanDWG/CleanPDF exporter plugin.

[JQL]

If you use Hybrid the triangles are not exported.

[francisquitof]

If you use autocad the command overkill will erase all the lines that are hidden under a line and will weld if you want all the straight splitted lines.

[ArchyVR]

Thank you both for the tips. Unfortunately I don’t have AutoCAD so can’t experiment with the overkill command.

As for my latest workflow, so far it seems that the hidden geometry does not show up in the exported DXF when using a style with the following settings and rendering the view as a Vector in Layout.

Edge
-Edges Checked
-Profiles Checked set to 2
Face
-Front Color Set to White
-Back Color set to White
-Style set to "Hidden Line Mode
-Transparency Checked
-Quality set to Faster
Background
-White
-Sky unchecked
-Ground unchecked
Modeling
-All unchecked except
-Section Cuts checked
-Section Line Width set to 4
-Section Fill checked
-Section Fill Color set to white

In Layout, I set the Line Scale of each model window down to 0.10 pt

This results in a very simply looking style that works fine for my Consultants to use as a background.

Here is the Style I created for this.
DWG Exports.style (3.7 KB)

There still are a million unnecessarily segmented lines, but without AutoCAD Overkill, I guess I’m out of luck for now.

SketchUp/Layout Team, if you can, please study how AutoCAD’s Overkill algorithm works and try to implement some process that would give us a clean WYSIWYG DWG, DXF and PDF exports.

Note, My system kept crashing on exports, and in the end, I think it was because I had a model window for Datum Heights grouped with some line work. This is normally not a problem on my PDF exports, but kept crashing with a vector based DWG export. Ungrouping seemed to fix the glitch.

Also, in general, Layout is painfully slow with rendering the model views of these vector sections of my design. I’ve done everything I know to do regarding best practices making the model efficient with both reduced polygons and limited texture sizes. I’m begging the Sketchup Team to Please, Please, Please find innovative ways to speed up Layouts rendering of model views and general working environment. CAD software should let me work at the speed of my thoughts, Instead Layout has me taking way too many coffee breaks, which ends up breaking my flow and ability to get things done.

Thanks