Relative Sketchup noob here so apologies if this is in the wrong place etc. I did a search but couldnt see anything relating to my enquiry.
I work in the entertainment industry and use AutoCAD for most of my work. We use dwg blocks a lot. I have a manufacturer that only has blocks of their products in SketchUp. I am trying to convert them to a dwg.
I have tried exporting them from Sketchup to dwg as well as importing from within ACAd using the Sketchup importer add on.
My issue is that either way the file sizes are comparativley huge. Is there any way of reducing these. I have played around with exporting faces only, edges only or combinations of all the options. Nothing seems to give me the results i am looking for.
For reference i am trying to convert the ModTruss range of products. They can be found in the 3d Warehouse.
All round surfaces in SketchUp are represented as series of flat faces and when exported to DWG in 3D every one of them becomes a separate polyface object. If the object to be exported has been made like this with very dense meshes the only way to reduce the size of the export would probably be to use some kind of polygon reducing add-on like Skimp prior to exporting.
I took a look at one of the components the manufacturer had posted. In principle it is quite intelligently made, with no computer cycles wasted for unnecessary detail like sheet thickness. But the large number of bolt holes still adds to the polygon count. They might perhaps have been made with fewer segments, and the large holes could have been represented as simple octagons.
Thanks for the reply. When i exported the file to AutoCAD (and tried the AutoCAD converter plug in) I got the same as you. I almost lost the will to live trying to delete all the unnecessary polygons that the conversion gave me.
I will try Skimp to see if that makes a difference.
