3D plans - walkthrough of house

liamolaighin

Hi I was wondering if there is a quick way of generating 3D plans of your house plans. I'd love to be able to take a virtual walkthrough of the house and I know it can be done but I don't want to pay a fortune for it. Have my CAD plans on file and was wondering if its possible to generate 3D plans from them alone.

Alternatively is there someone out there who does it???

seclachi

Its doable from cad plans, its a big job if its your first time, as all you can really get off the plans is the walls, the rest is tedious modelling work. I dont think it would be cheap either by professional or somebody doing it on the side, even a pro would take a week or so to do the house inside and out with a decent level of detail.

Thoie

I did that with Google Sketchup (free). I only spent about 20 minutes doing it (after looking through some tutorials), so it's not completely perfect with all my furniture exactly in the right places, but it's pretty good (I think) for someone who'd never done anything like that before. There's a "walkthrough" tool, which brings you to "person height" and allows you to walkthrough the place and look around you.

Here's a few screenshots of different views - the bedroom is the same - one viewfrom outside the window, the other from inside. You can see in the bathroom pic I just used the lines drawn in the plans to put in the toilet, sink and bath, and left them "raw". If you were willing to spend more than 20 minutes on it, you could cover over the pencil lines easily with a solid colour/pattern. Due to laziness I made the inside of the bath square - again the tool would allow you to put in the proper curves if you were willing to spend more time on it.

Because I used the original plans as a base, the walls are to scale. I didn't bother measuring furniture precisely, but you could if you wanted pinpoint accuracy.

I use the base I did for helping decide on new pieces of furniture. I get the measurements before I buy them, make up something of that size and plonk it into my design to see if a) it will fit and b) I like the idea of having something in that spot.

Jimbo

SketchUp is the way to go if you're thinking of doing it yourself. It's also free.
If you have the drawings on CAD, you can import the house plans and extrude the walls.

There's a bit of a learning curve and it can be quite tedious.

RKQ

Jimbo wrote: »

SketchUp is the way to go if you're thinking of doing it yourself.

+1 Good advice.
Doing your own home will help you see so much. It will help you to be totally familiar with your future home, which may help you as you build.
Well worth having a go... what have you got to loose?:)

liamolaighin

Jimbo wrote: »

SketchUp is the way to go if you're thinking of doing it yourself. It's also free.
If you have the drawings on CAD, you can import the house plans and extrude the walls.

There's a bit of a learning curve and it can be quite tedious.

Seem to be unable to import my plans into Sketchup. Have had a few attempts but doesn't seem to recognise .dwg format. Ah well might try doing it from scratch

Jimbo

I wouldn't fancy drawing up the entire plans on SketchUp again.

There are loads of video tutorials online:
http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=86648.

If SkechUp is not recognising your DWG, try saving it in again in an older DWG format in CAD.

Thoie

liamolaighin wrote: »

Seem to be unable to import my plans into Sketchup. Have had a few attempts but doesn't seem to recognise .dwg format. Ah well might try doing it from scratch

Ah - it's seems they've stripped that part from v7.1.

I was prompted to upgrade when I opened it to take screenshots, but didn't, so if you want I could try importing them, then saving them in sketchup for you? Alternatively for workarounds, see comment 10 here: http://www.sketchucation.com/importing-an-autocad-file-in-google-sketchup/

(Personally I'd feel weird about giving a stranger my house plans, so will totally understand if you don't want to do that )

seclachi

RKQ wrote: »

+1 Good advice.
Doing your own home will help you see so much. It will help you to be totally familiar with your future home, which may help you as you build.
Well worth having a go... what have you got to loose?:)

Agreed, it will give you a feel for the shape and nuances of it. One word of warning though, its not the real deal, there maybe differences you`ll only perceive when the house is built.

RKQ

There are great tutorials on YouTube - especially showing how to load your Cad plans into Sketchup.

Open a copy of your drawings, delete elevations & section, remove all layers, then save the plans as a DWF file to import into Sketchup. The video is easy to follow... good luck.

Mellor

seclachi wrote: »

Its doable from cad plans, its a big job if its your first time, as all you can really get off the plans is the walls, the rest is tedious modelling work. I dont think it would be cheap either by professional or somebody doing it on the side, even a pro would take a week or so to do the house inside and out with a decent level of detail.

If somebody took a week for a house they are in no pay a "pro".

liamolaighin wrote: »

Seem to be unable to import my plans into Sketchup. Have had a few attempts but doesn't seem to recognise .dwg format. Ah well might try doing it from scratch

What way are you trying to open it.

File>Open probably won't work.

Try importing.
File>Import>2D>Dwg/Dxf


The command structure might be a little different, I can't check as I have the full version of sketch-up here (not the google/free version) which is slightly different.

seclachi

Mellor wrote: »

If somebody took a week for a house they are in no pay a "pro".

Your right. A pro is going to have most of the stuff (furiniture, fittings)done out. I`m a bit tempered by the way I did it, took me about 20 hours just to do the outside (needless to say I havent even begun the inside). Its also a bit of a learning curve, I`m using C4d, I used the package before, but its complex, but the results are well worth it

Thoie

Mellor wrote: »

File>Open probably won't work.

Try importing.
File>Import>2D>Dwg/Dxf

The command structure might be a little different, I can't check as I have the full version of sketch-up here (not the google/free version) which is slightly different.

As mentioned earlier the latest free version 7.1 no longer imports *.dwg, though a plugin is available. See here for more details.

Mellor

Thoie wrote: »

As mentioned earlier the latest free version 7.1 no longer imports *.dwg, though a plugin is available. See here for more details.

Missed that one, thanks.

they keep taking out useful features of the free version. I had one of the original versions and it had a lot of features than are missing now.


solution: Download the Ruby script to run the import