Sketchup house, formZ base

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.

Next, export the modified terrain from fromZ as a 3ds. Import it into Sketchup, and put the house into the slot you created in formZ. It may be that you have to rotate the base around the Z axis to make this work. If this is the case, after you have integrated, rotate the base AND the house together back to an orthogonal position. Sketchup makes this easy by snapping to the X or Y axis. An orthogonally placed base will make the rest of pre-processing much easier.

Now you are ready to export a 3ds and CADspan and Magics.

This is not the only way to accomplish this task, however I did find it to be much faster than trying to import a sketchup dwg into formZ.