importing autocad 3d curved solid geomtry into sketchup

[tecton3d]

i've modeled a quick and dirty truss into autocad thinking that it would save me time and when imported it into sketchup, i get wierd artifacts on the curved surfaces no matter what the display resolution in autocad is set to, or if I explode then import the geometry. below is the truss in acad:

and when imported into SKP not exploded:

imported when exploded in ACAD:

fwiw ~ my ACAD settings:

 

so what's the "secret" to getting curved, solid ACAD geometry into sketchup?

 

thanks

[gfa2]

Have you tried bumping up the FACETRES variable in Acad?

[tecton3d]

thanks for the reply but no, it does not. The default on my machine was set to 10 and won't go any higher and when i turn it down to like .5 and re-import, it still does the weirdness i posted below:confused:

[gfa2]

I'm sure I've heard of a solution for this, I just can't remember it.

 

This is kind of silly but you could import the dwg into max (assuming you have max) then export that to 3ds and then import that to Sketchup. Or if you have an older version of Acad (2006 I think) that exports to 3ds, that would work too. If you do the 3ds thing, look for a setting called surface deviation, set it to .01, that will smooth out those curves.

[tecton3d]

yeah, i'm running acad desktop 2006 but the 3dsout (or saving as .dxf) doesn't fix the errors in sketchup. unfortunately, i don't have max.

 

thanks

[gfa2]

bummer...I'm almost positive the solution is on this forum somewhere.

[tecton3d]

haha ~ found it! when exporting as 3ds, set autosmoothing = 0.

 

woot!

 

thanks for your help

[bjornkn]

It sometimes helps to turn off "merge coplanar faces".

Or to draw a few lines across afterwards.

[P.R.S. Sivakumar .]

Thanks in advance! I must try this out. This is my real long term problem. I routinely import models from Acad into SU. Whenever I had curved objects I had a hell of a lot of problems.

 

Thanks again

With best regards

PRSS