vectorworks into sketchup

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Permalink Reply by Steven Glickman on February 7, 2010 at 2:27pm

I've been talking to NNA about this since before the SU->VW plug in was introduced, All I got was... "why would you want to do that" even though I do it often for existing buildings and my "workflow". Some other things that are just easier to do in VW for pre-design.

I believe they rely on a third part of the plug-in so it's not likely they will introduce what you (and I) are looking for. I usually use DWG export from VW to SU Pro but it can be messy if you have openings in walls that need editing. The best thought I have: if SU would allow a VW reference file inside it... in my dreams. Then the design process in SU would be more seamless.

My 2cents

Stevenaia

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Permalink Reply by Nick Williamson on February 8, 2010 at 1:02am

On the assumption you are using the walls tool and inserting windows and doors then all you have to do is make sure you are in 'Top' view as opposed to 'Top/Plan' ( i.e NOT the 2D view ) then export as a DWG file. Open up SketchUp and import the saved file ensuring you go to the 'Options' and tick all the boxes that are listed. It will come in as a full 3D model and stops you having to mess around closing faces in order to then Push/Pull the walls. It will probably be grouped when you bring it in so remember to 'Explode' it or double click to edit.

Use it all the time and works seamlessly (in my experience). No need for plug-ins etc

Try it and see. It's magic...

Nick

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Permalink Reply by Felipe Junqueira on March 21, 2010 at 2:04pm

Hey Eyal,

.3ds has this problem and another one, some faces comes with backface visible, and if you use Sketchup and some rendering engines available this is a huge problem since a lot of rendering engines doesn't understand backfaces.
I'm trying to work with VW sketchup and Vray for sketchUp.
The best way that I've found is to export in .dwg import it into SU and lost one hour to clean some extra-lines between two layers etc... after that Vray for sketchup makes me a lot more calm and happy with the results, but its far away from a good solution.
I am using now VW 2010 and some of the files can't be imported by Sketchup, the files are not reconigzed by SU a lot of times. This doesn't happens with my old VW 2008 version.
In this cases I'm usign .3ds and a ruby script inside SU that select faces by material to get geometry organized.
Weel I don't have a final solution. I love Vray and would be great to have a good .3ds or a .skp file directly from VW.
This simple change would let us have a greate freedom in terms of rendering solutions and presentations.
To me RW is a shame in terms of quality and speed, without color bleeding, ambient occlusion, a better global illumination is very hard to have a really nice image.
SketchUp importer works very well by the way!

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Permalink Reply by Felipe Junqueira on March 23, 2010 at 2:36pm

1-) "I tried to do it with a 3DS file but everything was polygonized ..." use merge coplanar faces in the option window before importing geometry inside SketchUp.

2-) Plug in windows and doors are imported merged with wall geometry, but symbols are exported as groups inside sketchup. So if you use sketchup and VW together a lot like me the best procedure is to work will door and windows transformed into symbols inside Sketchup.

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