Why are not dwg hatches imported / converted to faces with a defined material in Sketchup? Is the profoundly difficult for the translator?.. is it just no one in Development thought it useful? Is it because no users requested it…? Is it a licensing or legal issue?
Frankly, it would be very efficient for me in landscaping and urban planning work as hatching is the primary means in autocad for defining paving finishes, material, landuses etc…saving me from the need to manually recreate all these surfaces again
Drawing1.zip (59.4 KB)
If you create a region using the boundary command (setting the object option to region), SketchUP will fill the boundary in with a face.
Granted, it’s not a total solution, but it is a workaround.
Thanks for the tip, can you convert a hatch to a region with a single command in autocad? I don’t create the autocad files… they are just received from other consultants, and they never use regions, only hatches…
Not directly, but you can cobble something together by…
a. Create a new layer to use for the new faces
b. Use the “HATCHGENERATEBOUNDARY” command to create polyline boundaries of your hatches.
c. Isolate the new layer with “LAYISO” and select the new polyines when in the REGION command.
Hope it helps.
edit - Use the “UNION” command to combine intersecting region outlines into a single larger area.
thanks but no… the vector hatch pattern in autocad is of no interest… it is just when a hatch is imported into (if it was possible) SU it converts the hatch to a face (or faces) and assigns the material a unique name (preferably the hatch name name from the source file)…
for example,
I receive 2d dwg master plans of entire suburbs (4km x 2km) with all the landuses hatched.
It would be a huge time saver if when imported into SU the hatches were converted to faces with the material identified… then all i need to do is edit the material (colour and name etc) to suit my needs , rather than have to tediously make faces, and then paint the faces the colour i need… imagine an entire neighborhood where every road, footpath, grass verge, water body, paved area, etc needs to be assigned a material… of course this also benefits downstream rendering of the model…
Thanks, I use Draftsight and will see if that workflow can work… my initial question was rather rhetorical, wondering why in hell SU’s dwg translator could not handle hatch imports as hatching is such a fundamental means of defining areas… I was hoping some of the SU experts might enlighten me as to why such is the case!
If you have access to AutoCad or know someone who does, in AutoCad, you can select the Hatch and use the Explode command. Then export it. Hope this helps.
