Best way to Export a Revit model to Sketchup – Today I’m gonna show how to export a Revit model to DWG and then import it into Sketchup Let’s get started First open your model in 3D view. Here, I have created an isolated view that only show the building because as you can see my whole model is HUGE.
Best way to Export a Revit model to Sketchup
Let’s go back to the other view and get started, The first thing to do here is we are going to use Model Lines and draw a reference point.
This will help us align the different parts of the model later in Sketchup after importing Now let’s duplicate this view Rename it to the category that you want to export In this case I want to export the doors, so I renamed it to SKP (for sketchup) dash, doors Now we can use Visibility Graphics to hide all the other categories except doors And remember to keep the line’s category visible because that is what make up our reference point.
You can see that there are other things in the model that are not doors, what are these?
In this case, these are 3D or 2D models that I’ve imported, which I can turn off by going to the imported categories tab and uncheck them all. Remember that we have the Line’s category on? That’s what these are They’re just other lines I’ve drawn in my model, most of them are room separation lines or model line that I’ve created. You can easily hide these by right-clicking the line, go to hide – category or elements. Do the same for other unwanted lines.
Just make sure you DON’T hide our reference lines And there you have it, the Doors are ready to be exported I will repeat this process for another category. Let’s duplicate the doors view and rename it to, say, Walls Use VG to bring up visibility graphics uncheck the doors check the walls Press OK, BOOM, done.
The reason why we don’t have to hide the other unwanted models or lines like before is because we duplicated the doors view and in that view those elements were already hidden and Revit remembered that Let’s do the same for Curtain Walls. Now, curtain walls are a little bit tricky. But let’s repeat our normal process.
Duplicate the view, rename to curtain walls, press VG to go to Visibility Graphics check the curtain panels and curtain systems, mullions, and uncheck the last category, which is Walls And what happened? Only one piece of the curtain walls showed up, and that visible element is actually a curtain system.
Now let’s go to my isolated view, and you can see that there are in fact curtain walls in my model, lots of them, actually. But only the curtain systems showed up in our new view the curtain walls did not show up because they are Actually part of WALLS So let’s go to Visibility Graphics check Walls and press OK Well there you go, they showed up! But, along with the actual walls. Now to clean up the model, and only show the curtain walls, we can hide these by first selecting a type of wall that we don’t want to show, then right click, select all instances in view, then right click again, hide in view – elements.
A faster way to do this is to use keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is select one wall that you’d like to hide, press SA to select similar elements in the model, then press EH to hide those elements in view, this will hide all walls that are the same Type, and it really speeds up the “cleaning” process a lot.
Now that all the walls are hidden, I have an isolated view of the curtain walls But let’s say my curtain walls are consisted of other elements such as glass, mullions, and rain screen panels, then I can repeat the same workflow to separate those elements.
Step one, duplicate the view and rename it to the category that you want to export step two, Use Visibility Graphics and keyboard shortcuts to hide everything except the category that you want to show And just repeat this process until you have separated the different categories that you want to export in their respective views Now remember that the reason why we’re separating these categories in Revit before exporting is to make it EASIER to apply materials when we import the model into Sketchup.
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Once you’ve got all the different categories of the model organized in different views, you can then start the exporting process. You can see in the project browser that I have approximately 15 different categories that I want to export. Of course there are more elements in a model than those 15 types, but since the model is quite big, I want to export only the things that are essential to the project.
Also keep in mind that there’s no point transferring an element to Sketchup that doesn’t show in the final rendering. In this case, I want to do an exterior rendering, there’s no point in importing elements such as furniture because most of them are in the interior. Now let’s start the exporting process. Go to one of the 3D views that we’ve created. Click Revit Icon, go to Export, CAD Formats, DWG.
We’ll be doing this for all the views as well, so it’s good to use keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process, but since Revit doesn’t have a default shortcut for exporting the model to DWG, we can set up our own hotkey.
To do that, Click the Revit Icon, go to Options, User Interface, Keyboard Shortcuts, Customize. And search for DWG, and it’s this Command right here I’d like to set mine as Ctrl+E because well E is for export, but you can do whatever you like Press OK again Now watch how fast this is I want to export this view right? So I press Ctrl+E, Enter, Enter again, that’s it! Next one Ctrl+E, Enter, Enter You get the point When you’ve got all of these views exported to DWG, let’s import them into SketchUp Open up Sketchup and go to File->Import and then just select one of the views that you have exported.
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There you go, that’s the walls. Also note that this is the reference point we have created earlier Again, I like to use keyboard shortcuts to speed up the process. Sketchup doesn’t have a default hotkey for importing, but I can customize my own by going to Window, Preferences, shortcuts, and search for import. You can see that I’ve already set mine to Ctrl+I, well because I is for import, but it can be anything you want. Now I can press Ctrl+I, then select my next category, which is structure in this case.
And there we go. Notice how the structure that I’ve just imported doesn’t line up correctly with the walls? All we need to do is press M for the move tool and move the reference point into the correct position, which is right here.
That’s pretty much all the steps, just repeat this process until you’ve imported all of the parts of the model. The import is finished!
Now watch me apply materials to All of the curtain walls glass in one click. Ready? BOOM It’s magic baby SO how did I do it? If you’ve been following all of the steps since the beginning, you already know how I did it. It’s because we separated each category before exporting so that when we imported each of the Views from Revit, they come in as separate Components or Groups.
Which make it super easy to select and apply materials quickly. I’m actually selecting all the glass right now, and if I double-click, I will go to Edit Component Mode and you can see that other geometries are faded out while the glass are highlighted. There’s actually a trick that you can use to make it even EASIER to see the geometries that you are editing. Go to Window, Model Info, Components, Fade rest of model, Check the Hide box. And BAM Sketchup hides everything else, and now you can see all of the glass.
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If you have some trouble trying to select the group that you want, try using Sketchup’s Outlined tool. Just go to window, Outlined. This tool lists out all of the groups that you have and you can select the group by clicking on its name on the list. This makes the selection process even easier. Now, before I end this tutorial, let’s go through all of the steps of this workflow again.
Number One Create a 3D View of your model Number Two Draw a reference point Number Three Duplicate view and rename it to the category that you want to export Number Four Use VG and keyboard shortcuts to hide everything except the category that you want to show Number Five Repeat the process for all of the other parts of the model that you want to export Number Six Export each view to DWG And Seven Import each view to Sketchup And there you go
That’s the best way to export a Revit model to Sketchup, well the best that I know But if you know of any other way or have any suggestions, just let me know in the comment’s section below.
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