Trimble Business Center

Are there any tricks on exporting usable surfaces into sketchup?

Sketch up seem to struggle with large surfaces triangle (existing ground & road surface)

Ideally, around the cut fill earthworks/ pavements in components or groups so they can be used in 4d planning

What I want to do is to use a Sketchup file or IFC file in synchro 4d planning software, but it seems to struggle with the large amounts of data, is there any way of simplifying the surface data 

You might want to Grid the files and then Triangulate the Gridded files and send those over as nice uniform Triangles.

You can also export as DWG 3D faces and import those into Sketchup, that may work better than trying to send the surface across as a TIN 

Sketchup does not have a TIN model, and it messes with Triangles that fall on a Plane and turns them into large planar polygons. Sketchup also only has single precision coordinates not Double Precision so it really struggles with large coordinate values - you could try moving everything to 0,0 and then exporting it to Sketchup.Sketchup was developed for architects and all buildings are designed with 0,0 in the mix somewhere - it is extremely good with Building data but it is not at all optimized for big area projects, large coordinates or TIN Surface Models.

It does have some Point Cloud options so you may be able to output the nodes of a surface as a Point Cloud and do something with it in Sketchup. 

We don't yet have a way to output a Surface TIN to an IFC object model, I have that on my list of things to look at for BIM modeling purposes.

Let me know if any of these help at all

Alan

Thanks, Alan 

It will be great when we can do 4D BIM planning for earthworks, as it helps clients & the team understand the construction phasing