🚀 Speckle SketchUp Connector Alpha

Making Speckle
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Hello everybody,

I am hyped to share with you guys an early alpha build of our new connector for SketchUp 2021!

Wanna get your SketchUp model into Speckle Land? Bam :boom:

How about Rhino geometry into SketchUp? Whoosh :dash:

rhino to sketchup

SketchUp back to SketchUp? Well… I’m still working on that :sweat_smile:

The current state of affairs:

  • Sending out (including groups and components which get converted into Speckle Blocks) is pretty well supported.
  • Receiving SketchUp geometry is best supported in Rhino, Unreal, and AutoCAD (the places where Speckle Blocks are best supported).
  • Receiving into SketchUp is unreliable: meshes are generally well supported (so Revit, Blender, etc into SketchUp is ez pz) but Blocks are not yet fully supported. Simple blocks should come in, but very nested blocks (which SketchUp likes to produce) will often not work as expected.
  • UPDATE: as of v2.0.5, receiving back into SketchUp should work as expected :partying_face:. Note that groups will be received back into SketchUp as component instances.

The connector is a work in progress, but it would be super helpful to get feedback and feature requests from you guys! I’d love to know what applications are the most important to you and what kind of workflows you imagine this fitting into.

Speckle SketchUp is available now from Speckle Manager! Check out our “getting started” post for the rundown on how it all works✨

Wanna get a bit more involved? Have a look at the repo:

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pinging @Scott_Deisher re this post :wink:

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When attempting to connect SketchUp into Revit - I am having difficulty getting anything to go through that is not a simple straight wall. Any openings, change in height, or wall returns do not transfer to Revit at all. It shows correcting on the web app, but once opened in Revit, it either fails or shows incorrect geometry. I have shared my test images showing my wall in SketchUp, and what Revit reads.

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UPDATE: we’ve actually discovered that this is not a SketchUp Connector issue, but a Revit Connector issue. Receiving blocks in Revit is currently causing issues - we’ve tracked the issue and are working on a fix!

Hey @Kyleb,

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, receiving in Revit is a bit patchy atm - Revit is very picky about what it accepts in its TessalatedShapeBuilder and SketchUp does not make it easy to get clean meshes :sweat_smile:

I did make a bit of progress today in further cleaning up meshes out of SketchUp though and am continuing to work towards resolving this issue. I’m also planning to see if there are optimisations we can make on the Revit side re Blocks as I noticed that SketchUp geo in particularly is a bit slow coming in. Stay tuned! If you have any previous experience with this and have any suggestions to share, I’d be interested to hear it :innocent:

However, you should be able to receive everything pretty reliably in Rhino, AutoCAD, and Unreal if you’d like to play around a bit more with the connector!

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Nice work!! I definitely think this will be a big selling point for Speckle; 3D warehouse + Speckle sounds like a tasty combo. Looking forward to testing it out :+1:

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Popping in for a quick update ^^

As of v2.0.5:

  • :flying_saucer: Receiving SketchUp models back into SketchUp has been fixed! Note that groups will be received back as component instances - let me know if this is an issue
  • :white_square_button: Fixed a bug where closed polylines would not be closed when received
  • :straight_ruler: Fixed a bug where simple lines would get missed
  • :microbe: Fixed a bug where breps would sometimes be missed - they should now always come in as meshes
  • :tropical_drink: Fixed a bug where commits from Blender would sometimes not get fully parsed
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7 posts were split to a new topic: :eyes: SketchUp Authorisation Issues