In my everyday experience i usually start drafting a floor plan in sketchup one of two ways.
Import floor plan to sketchup.
There are many times when you want to import existing information into sketchup in order to incorporate it with your model.
Pdf is a very common file format and you ll find many architectural drawings are shared in pdf format as well as most product.
Sketch floor plan to 3d in sketchup.
For most professional users of sketchup it is not an uncommon thing to start off with 2d plans drafted using dedicated cad software which then gets imported into sketchup for the subsequent 3d modeling of the said 2d drafts.
You can also trace an image to model a 2d design that you want to place somewhere in a 3d model.
In this sketchup tutorial we ll introduce a free tool that you can use to convert pdf s to dxf files which you can import into sketchup pro.
Either i start from scratch using measurements i ve taken at the home usually in combination with a basic floor plan that i drew from the assessor s site or i work from a pdf floor plan provided by an architect or builder i ve already covered how to start your floor plan from field.
It gets the whole job done.
In this article you also discover how sketchup data is exported into cad format.
Lots of these 2d drafts will come in the form of pdf documents.
Tracing an image is an easy and thus common way to create a floorplan in sketchup and then turn that plan into a 3d model.
Sketchup can take you from floor plan to finished project.
If you re exporting a sketchup pro file to a cad format how you import a cad file depends on whether it s a 2d file such as a floor plan or a 3d model.
Whatever you re trying to model here s how to start tracing an image.