frank's blog

It seems that one good way to integrate a house that is drawn in Sketchup with a base/terrain drawn in FormZ is to export the base as a 3ds and import it into Sketchup. The key is to use formZ to mark where the footprint of where the house goes.

Export the object(s) that intersect the ground plane from sketchup as 3ds or dwg. Import them into formz, integrate the house objects with the terrain mesh, then difference all or part of the house objects from the terrain. All you really need is one corner of the house to be differenced out of the base.

Getting a Google SketchUp file into a 3D printer is not as straight-forward as one might hope. The geometry produced by SketchUp (SKP from now on) is inherently "not solid," and as we all may or may not know, geometry must be solid to print in 3D. One of the great benefits of using SKP is that a user does not have to worry about making sure all objects are solid and/or well formed. This is very nice and makes things quicker, until it comes time to print a SKP model. Now we have all kinds of problems.

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