Transcript:
Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of. Tim Harvison. Designs calm in this series. We’re going to be looking at Sketchup again. This is part 2 of an interoperability series and this one we’re going to be looking at. How do you get your site context model that you’ve built so beautifully in Sketchup all the way over to rhinos, so you can start leveraging the model creation with Grasshopper and all the great things that Rhino has to offer. So once you’ve finished your context model that I demonstrated a few tips and techniques in the in part one, you are then ready to come into. Rhino, some of the things that we covered was the high quality imagery that you can get out of Sketchup. If you zoom in, you can actually get even sharper images than you’re seeing here. Google Maps is regularly updated, so that’s also a huge benefit and you can also get some topography. And so you can see here. I’ve gone ahead and modeled my topography with steps, so I have nice flat plains to model on rather than a smooth mesh. That’s just how I decided to go with it. And if you know this place, this is actually. Rochester, Minnesota, where I did my thesis project just about a year ago. So once you’ve got this ready to go the first step, you’re probably in a newer version of Sketchup than is allowed. So if you go hop over Rhino double-check your units to begin with so options units. Make sure your units are matching, so I’m in feet and my Sketchup is in feet, and then I want to go ahead and import it now by default, you’d see here you want to go to import, but instead you actually want to do insert inserts going to give you more options than just a standard import. So if I click that now, this gives me the second dialog box, which I can first select my file and pick two Rhino, which is what I’ve done and I wanted as a block instance. I can add notes if I want to. I want to uncheck prompt insertion point and leave everything else exactly as it is when I hit. OK, it’s going to give me a dialog box that says hey. I want to embed embed link or link this and we can talk about the differences in second, but I want to. I want to make a point. First, just hit okay and measure trim planes or just get hit, okay. Oh, no, this was on purpose. Don’t worry! I know what I’m doing. Rhino is giving me an error, It’s saying, hey, please save your sketchup file in version 8 and try reading it again at the moment. Rhino 5 only supports Sketchup version 8 So you’re going to have to back? Save your sketchup before you ready to import. So otherwise you will not get any of your stuff in so first step is save as and sometimes you can save a copy. I’m just going to overwrite my file. Change it back to a version 8 and hit save and yes. I do want to replace it, OK? So now that we’re saved, Let’s go ahead and go back to Rhino and again I want to go ahead and file insert or ctrl. I locate my file. Click on micro and remember. I’ve save this down to version 8 I want to click block instance. There’s a couple options, but this is what we want. I want to uncheck insertion point. It remembered it from before, and I want to hit. OK the next step. I want to link this file. Embed is going to give the Rajee AMA tree. It’s a fire-and-forget process and instead. I want to link this. I can add notes. Urls different things. If I have specific stuff I want, but I’m good with this, so I’m going to go ahead and hit OK and one more step. It’s going to tell me a mesh or trim planes now. Trim planes are essentially the same as rhino surfaces, and if you’re planning to do some editing, then that’s the ideal, but meshes are faster, and they also will remember the textures both remember the the textures that you import especially. If you keep this, but we’re going to go with mesh. For now. Trimmed planes will also give you kind of nice edges, and you’ll see what I mean in a second and I want to make sure this is that zero, because if I have it at the default 22 or more, what that’s going to do is it’s going to take a whole bunch of points along curves, and if it’s within, you know, for example, 20 degrees, then it’s going to synthesize those into one line, rather than keeping all the smoothness that we worked so hard to make in Sketchup. So it’s up to you, but I typically just go back to zero because I want to keep my model exactly as it is made, And then I had okay now. The reason that we do, the insertion point is zero is because Rhino does not allow you to relocate the world origin axes. So in Sketchup. Remember, you can take the axes here. And I can start to click new direction where that world origin begins as long as it’s you know, the outermost layer. And then, if I’d, you know double-click in right, then this has its own axis, but if Rhino does not have that option, you can only do name to see planes, so if I check seaplane and I want to change this to something else, I can save that, but this is, um, an update and a reality. The world origin will always be the same. You can’t adjust that, which is probably good, but you have to be conscious of it. So where there is my model way over here and I think this is because in some ways, Sketchup does remember the world axes, but in any event we’ve got our model, and if I turn on rendered mode, you can see, it actually has remembered all those textures. Yeah, and it’s not quite perfect, it’s. Actually, this is something that you may not think of right away, but if I go back to Sketchup and turn on hidden geometry, and if I turn on my layers, I have a drawing plane. This is what I used to do some stuff. I also have terrain and this is being brought in as well, even though we have, it turned off visibility wise in our editor here, rhino is reading that and bringing it in. Now if you want, you can just go ahead and delete it in Rhino, but just be aware that this stuff will come along for the ride so to edit this. I’m probably going to just going to go ahead and double click. I’m going to click this. I’m going to right-click. Pull out my block definition, and this comes in again as a block. If I look at my properties, and if I go ahead and just edit block definition. You can see already that because we linked the file. Our only option is we can move this. We can translate this, but we can’t actually explode this and start editing it. So if we change this to, you know, explode this then we could start editing and start deleting out content. But then we’ve broken our link that we really want so. I’m going to undo a couple of times and I’m back to my original block instance and what I actually want to do is. I want to go back to Sketchup. I want to edit the model here, and this is why it’s actually so powerful because I can edit my Sketchup model and reload it to my Rhino model with the changes being made. So I’m going to go ahead and just make a couple changes here and delete this out. I’m going to delete this out and we delete these roads out. Now remember, once I hit Ctrl shift s. I’m going to resave that as a version 8 This might get annoying, but just you’ll get used to it. Save as a version 8 and then we’re going to hop back into Rhino. Once this is done and you will see that this this live link is working. Hopefully, so maybe just build smaller site context models. And you won’t have these issues. Um, one thing, too, is if you want to purge and keep these nice and light, this is just. Sketchup deal. But I would recommend getting the the this is a little off topic. But Tomtom developer. Sketchup, go ahead. This is just a side note, But Sketchup models can get heavy pretty quickly, especially with extra components that you’ve been bringing in and adding throughout those add information is saved. Even if you delete it in your model space. And so he’s made a great tool called cleanup and in this plugin. Um, it actually gives you a video, but it gives you a whole bunch of options to kind of purge your model and reduce the file size and keep it cleaned up the other way. I’ve found is if I start to get really big models. I simply create a brand-new. Sketchup file. I all copy paste in place and just go from there and that’s actually worked out pretty well as well so now that we got that saved, Come back over here, and if I again, pull out my block tool tool box here. I can go to the block manager and click that open and you can see right away. Linked file is newer and this can get a pretty extensive list. But, um, you might want to rename these in your file to be like numbers, so they automatically sort to the top of the list. You can’t actually sort these just. FYI, little tip. But I want to just simply update and I want to remesh that and keep that going, and Ron is going to think for a second, but when it’s done if I close one block updated successfully. Voila, there is our updated model, so think about it if I have a whole bunch of stuff. I could actually have multiple Sketchup models working simultaneously with different members of my team or I could be working on this just separately to keep it nice and clean, and this is going to go ahead and bring along all the textures with it and even better. I remember I imported this at where it wanted to be, but I can go to top view. I can reset this to the world origin and put my put my site right over the top. So if I go to render view, you can see my sites right there, and then if I make any changes, this block instance, will update where it is. It won’t relocate back, lets. See you, it won’t relocate back to where it started. It will actually stay put where it is. Once you’ve moved that in Rhino, but again, you can’t edit this here so typically make, like 95 99 percent of your changes and then wait, and then if you absolutely have to make a change after the fact it’s little, then you could probably explode this and do those edits then but avoid exploding at all costs. So now that we have that you can start to put that on its own layer, so you can see it comes in with its own layer. It remembers the layers that were in your Sketchup model. It remembers their colors, and if you wanted to be crazy, you could actually override the textures that you brought in with these layer colors, but we’ll avoid that for now and I typically will just go ahead and lock that down and now I’m ready to begin working, typically -. I’ll actually do a couple more steps. I’ll find where my site is located and match that to the world front and the world top. So I’ll actually move my model to, uh, to facilitate the world axes so again. I’ll just go to wireframe. There’s the axes there. I want to turn on world top just to reset that. And then I would probably just double check this. Um, to go down, you know, just to match and the other thing I do too is if it’s too difficult to find, I can also simply create a new set of seaplanes and save those as my sort of starting world plan from our project, So I’d be like Project North Project South, so I’d start. Get going here. I’d say seaplane. I’d come in, turn on Vertex, so we can snap to our meshes and maybe start here and say, that’s my project sort of Base ground zero plan. And now we go ahead and name that out and you know, Zero Zero now. Just say project level zero. You know, you can come over that ever naming convention you want, and then you know, if I if I start to update this, I can click up and I can start 15 feet and I can save that out and I can start building up my levels, just like you would in Revit, but I’m doing it in Rhino, and you know, this can change, but, you know, this is typically a workflow in Revi’t well. Get your levels kind of locked in. Um, you might not want to be that constrained to begin with in in Rhino, but let’s just say and one more little thing I save some time is I’ll hit. Save right, click hit, save current sea plane. I can copy this text control C. And then I can hit save as control V and then just fit too. And I can start to build this up, right. This is all so I can restock this and whatever so good stuff. And then if you know if stuff changes over time, like if your level to adjust, you can simply go back to your seaplane. Adjust that elevation, you can type in exact dimensions If you want to, so I could start typing in like, you know, Five feet that moves up. I can just right click. Save current sea plane has hit. OK, overwrite that, and now I’ve got my new sort of direction. It’s not quite as smart as Revit, where all the stuff associated that level will follow. But if you are in grasshopper and stuff is referencing that particular level, then you can om or if you had a point built. That was referenced in grasshopper than everything in grasshopper would update so grasshopper again is the obviously the parametric control over rhino elements. So that’s why you know, you’d want to bring in stuff from Sketchup to Rhino and then start building out your awesome model in Grasshopper. So I think that’s all. I really wanted to show again. You know this this? The beautiful thing is that this is coming in with all the textures that we already made in Sketchup. So if I had made these PNG trees instead of just, you know, solid whites that would come as well and you know, it’d be ready, ready to render with a good context, you know, and then you could use your tools and your day lights and everything you used to, so just want to show that and the update ability to work between two different files and have them sort of synchronizing with central. If you want to cause talk. Revit terms. So that’s how you do that In the next video, part 3 I will show you how to import into Revi’t and then change the styles from there so you can start to seamlessly fit your stuff in to Revit? Okay, stay tuned.