How is sketchup still a thing?
Someone sent me a dwg file from it and after battling to convert it it all just open faces.
Does anyone use it for exporting to STL and what can I tell him to send me a usable model.
I know there is a plugin via a guitar list website. If you google stl plugin for sketchup should pop right up. However really he someone should be sending it through a “wrapping” program to make sure or make it become a watertight model. Many open source model wrapping programs out there.
Thank you. found the plugin and a export tutorial and sent him a link.
I use Sketchup often for design. I used it years ago and its just what I am fastest in. Trying to learn Fusion360 but it has its own idiosyncrasies. There’s 3 extensions he has to have so tell him to go to the Extensions Warehouse and download SketchUp STL (its one of the most downloaded extensions), Solid Inspector2 (just makes sure the model is solid) and CleanUp3 (this is more for importing STL’s than anything else but I run all my models through it before using Solid Inspector2).
These 3 are enough to get good solid STL’s
Sketchup can be painful to do some things but with a lot of things its a lot easier than most of your CAD type programs. Plus there are a ton of extensions that make your life a lot easier.
Like I said, I’m trying Fusion360 but it is a steep learning curve in some aspects. Some things are great, others are completely illogical 
but that can be said when learning any new program
I read something about Sketchup some time ago, which I found helpful. The claim was that Sketchup was initially designed to create architectural scale drawings. So, things in the scale of meters. When we try to use it to design things for 3D printing, in scales of milimeters, or smaller, the math routines in Sketchup aren’t designed to handle the tiny fractions and you get rounding errors that pile up.
The suggested workaround was to create your design at a much larger scale, export the STL, then scale the STL down to the desired size.
I tried this on some designs that were giving me problems exporting and it seemed to work.
Once particular case I recall this working for me was when I was trying to create some extruded text, in Sketchup. When I created it at 1x scale, it would export a non-manifold STL.
After I scaled it up, the exported STL was fine.
This was a few years ago, so my remembry is light on exact details.
Sketchup most definitely has a minimum dimension that it will tolerate. If you try to make a 1mm circle with 360 sides, and then overlap it with another circle with 360 sides, you’ll probably see the issue. Where the circles intersect, Sketchup will get grumpy about the extremely small resulting segments. Likewise if you try to boolean high-poly 3d shapes from each other; the mesh intersection typically gets messed up.
That said, like all Sketchup STL issues, there is a minor learning curve and then you don’t have those problems any more. For example, if you draw a manifold part, you will get a clean STL! But newbies don’t know how to draw manifold geometry in the first place.
It’s an architecture program at heart. So it very purposefully allows people to make non-manifold geometry. Forcing watertightness would make life unnecessarily difficult for the majority of its userbase who is doing display models, not solids modeling.
Seems I may have opened up a can of worms.
Yeah they do, it’s an extension called Solid Inspector2. It takes a look at your model and repairs what it can and notifies of what it can’t and shows the area in red. I had problems with Sketchup as well till I started using A combination of Solid Inspector2 and CleanUp3.
And Fusion 360, a product purposefully designed for 3D design and CNC also isn’t perfect. I’ve had to repair STL’s from Fusion in Meshmixer a few times. It just really comes down to what your needs are and what you feel most comfortable with. A slow car driven fast will always feel better than a fast car driven slow 