Clean up CAD drawings with extensions - SketchUp Tutorial

- [Lecturer] When you're working with imported CAD drawings, there's typically a lot of cleanup that is necessary before you can use the information directly to create a 3D model in SketchUp. For example, in this model I've already cleaned it up to some degree by toggling off certain layers and eliminating unneeded objects, but also over here I notice if I orbit around that some of the edges don't appear to be on the ground plane. This is something that would be quite tedious to fix manually because each vertex seems to be a different height and elevation. Fortunately there's a global way to fix this using an extension. I'd like to show you that now. This particularly extension that I have in mind is accessible through SketchUcation's plug in library. And you can access that from this URL. First register for a free account, and you can just click Download Now and you'll download thinking rbz file. Once it's downloaded, go back into SketchUp and choose Window, Extension Manager. And click install Extension. So elect the rbz file and open it. And close the extension manager. Now up here we have a new menu that says Extensions and we can choose SketchUcation, ExtensionStore. And you can sort this list in different ways. There are numerous extensions that you can explore. But what I'm interested in is a specific extension, so I'll search for it by name. It is called drop vertices, and it's by TIG. You can download that and install it just by clicking that red button. Be warned that you're giving this access to your file system so you want to be sure to trust this author. I'll choose Yes, and then it tells me where it was installed, and I'll click OK. Then I can close the Extension store and we have a new item in the menu up here. This particular extension works with a selection, so what I need to do is orbit, make that selection and then choose Drop Vertices, in this case, to Z equals question mark. And we'll set that to zero and click OK, that's it. All those vertices are dropped down to the ground plane. Another thing that we need to do is generate surfaces in every enclosed boundary. So for example, over here I could do that by drawing a line and tracing over an existing edge, and that would generate a surface, but this would incredibly tedious to do manually, to trace over each edge, so fortunately this is something that's better solved with an extension. To do this let's go ahead and access this extension, not through the SketchUcaton Store, but this time through the builtin Extension Warehouse. First register for a free account, and now in this case I'll type in make faces, enter. And it's this one here, s4u Make Face. And it's this top item here, I'll click on it, and then install. I'll say Yes, and OK, and then close the Extension Warehouse. Up here we have a new item in the menu, Make Face. Again, it needs a selection, so I'll make a selection including everything in the model, and I'll choose Make Face. It generates surfaces in each enclosed boundary. So it worked really well, but it also subdivided the floor into these different sections where we have furniture, and that's not really what I intended, so I'm going to undo, and then go to Window, Layers and toggle off the furniture layer, and then select everything again and use Make Face. Because it works on the selection, it generates the surface, filling up the whole floor area. I'd like to draw in a line here, to cut off the outside and separate it from the inside. We also need, it looks like I'll go in the top view and it looks like we need another line right over here to generate a surface in the garage. So we have different surfaces in each enclosed boundary area. I'll turn the furniture layer back on and observe that the furniture is now shown in bold because these are considered to be stray edges that do not define surfaces. We can clean all of this up, globally, using another script. And this script will cleanup your line work. It will take care of things like stray edges and cases where we have multiple colinear lines, it will join them together. To access this last extension, go back to the Warehouse and type in cleanup, enter. We're looking for cleanup cubed, which is a script by TomTom, here it is I'll click on it and then install. Yes, and OK. Now another window pops up in this case and it informs us that TT Lib squared is not installed. This is a script library that's required in many of TomTom's extensions, so I'm going to scroll down here and click on the requirement like, TT Lib squared and then install that as well. Yes, and OK. Because of this two-part nature of the library being separate from the cleanup script we do not see it up here in the menu. What we'll have to do is save this file and I'll call it CADImport2, and then quit SketchUp, relaunch SketchUp and then you'll see a new item in the Extensions menu right here. cleanUp cubed, Clean. You don't need a selection in this case is your scope is set to the entire model. Local would be in the case where you want to run this inside of the group or a component, and the scope Selected would just apply to the selection. I wanna apply it the entire Model. I want to Show Statistics at the end. I'll Purge anything that's unused, including components, materials, styles and layers. I'll Erase any Hidden Geometry. I don't need to Erase Duplicate Faces, very slow. And we shouldn't really have any duplicates because we just generated these faces. I'll move all the Gemetry to Layer0, thereby eliminating all these CAD layers. I'll Merge any Identical Materials knowing their attributes. I don't need to Merge Coplanar Faces. If I did, I'd end up with just a single face, 'cause all of the faces in the model right now are coplanar, namely they're on the ground plane. Down here Repair Split Edges is what we'll join any colinear lines together. Erase Stray Edges will erase any edges that are shown in bold such as the furniture in here. And I'll go ahead and click Cleanup. It gives us a listing of what it did. It reduced over 3,000 edges, it got rid of one component, 10 layers, seven materials. And let's take a look at Model Info. On Statistics you'll see that we're down to just over 1100 edges, we have 100 faces, we have no materials, just the default layer, and just the default style. So I think we've reduced this probably as much as is possible here and we're in a good place now to begin a 3D modeling project using this CAD data.