SketchUp

I created a drawing of a house plan in Sweet Home 3d (a free app) some time ago and wanted to see how well SketchUp handled it. The drawing has walls, windows, doors, some furniture, and other ditties. I wanted to see if SketchUp could put a roof on the house but I never got that far.

It didn’t crash.

I exported the file from Sweet Home 3D as a .obj file (the only option you have) and imported this file into Cheetah3D (an awesome app). I then exported it from Cheetah3D as a .3ds file.

SketchUp did not import a .3ds file properly at all.

So, I exported the file from Cheetah3D to a .dxf file which SketchUp did import albeit very slowly. The resulting drawing was tiny in scale. This is not right. I need accurate dimensions. The resulting file had over 250,000 entities – what did this thing do, take every itty bitty line and make it an entity?

As a result, moving around is EXTREMELY slow – zooming and panning tested my patience.
I did draw a few things but lost interest in using it because it’s performance on this file was so bad.

SketchUp can be used for *simple* drawings containing small numbers of objects and that’s about it. It is like 3D electronic graph paper and it might serve your needs so give it a try but don’t be surprised if it starts to balk at higher levels of complexity.