Hello,
I’m new to Sketchup. I’ve just exported a 3d model from rhino7 to Sketchup Pro 2021 through the .dxf extension. However, once imported onto Sketchup I only found the buildings with a wireframe view. I exploded the block of buildings and changed the view to Shaded but nothing changed. I would like to have a surface on all of the buildings. I went back to Rhino7 and selected .skp to export my file but there’s not Sketchup 2021 in the list. So I selected Sketchup 2020 but the whole block is black on Sketchup and I can’t select anything. Can you please help? Thanks
The black you see might consist of a couple of zillion short edges.
Rhino uses quite an insane number of facets/vertices when converting its NURBS surfaces into meshes for conversion into polygon modelling formats like SketchUp. When I have had to do that (haven’t got Rhino 7 yet) I have prior to exporting as SKP first converted the surfaces into meshes and then reduced them with the polyreduce function inside Rhino. That has given me somewhat manageable face/edge counts.
Thank you 
I’ve imported now the contour lines but it’s separated from the building. Would you know how to keep all the layers together please?
That looks like a standard digital map. Did you import it from a DWG or DGN file?
Typically maps have contours in 3D while other data like building footprints and plot boundaries etc. are “2D” and located below the contours at the zero “sea” level.
Hi @Karen29, I don’t know if you want another tool in your workflow, but Moment of Inspiration (MoI3D.com) does a good job of converting 3DM to SKP, with tessellation control on the export. MoI uses the same native file format as Rhino but you may need to save your. 3DM file to an earlier Rhino version to bring it into MoI. If you have a lot of this work to do it might be worth the cost. Hope this helps.
Thanks. Yes I found it on digimap, it’s a dwg. I would like to ‘patch’ the surface onto the contour lines. Do I need to download an extension to do this?
Thank you @psaal I’ll have a look at it!
Not necessarily. The Sandbox from Contours tool can wrap a surface on top of your contours.
If your contours have an overwhelming amount of segments the Simplify Contours Tool by the SketchUp Team might be handy. Fredo6’s TopoShaper (from Sketchucation)is another toposurface creator that produces a slightly different, some say better, surface from the native tool.