From Sketchup to waterjet cutting at K-cut help

[MattLampitt]

Hi again, here for some more help if that’s okay. Hahaha
Of all the available free CAD software, I chose Sketchup to learn and do my designs on. (slight regret now).
Now I come to get my weapon disc and bar water jet cut and I’m hitting problems.
I got a plug-in so I can export my Sketchup designes to DXF and sent them to K-Cut. But they are unable to read the files. I’m really hard pushed to get this bot finished in the available time for robodogo next month and would be great if someone could help me out some way here.


The Sketchup drawings are only 2d
They are in Top camera view.
Exported to pollyface mesh DXF (whatever that means)


Any ideas? That don’t involve me learning another cad software rite now?


Cheers
Matt

[McMullet]

Without having to necessarily learn to use other software, might be worth downloading Fusion 360 so you have something you can check the files against (i.e., if you can open the DXF file in F360 then K-cut would be able to as well). Could also be possible to export from Sketchup in a format that F360 can read then export to something that K Cut can read.

[MattLampitt]

That’s not a bad idea.. he said he used Autocad and there was no entity in the files so I have downloaded the free trial to see if I can fathom it out.

[Shakey]

Export in polylines!

I flatten the plates to just be the profile of them (ie 2D of every plate) and export as dxf in polylines. Polyfaces is never liked by my machines or others.

[shakesc]

One way I check is emachineshop
Import the dxf - it seems really good at finding issues in what should be a clean file

[MattLampitt]

Thanks for your help everyone... I got there in the end.. :-)

i ended up downloading the pro version of Sketchup (trial) and exported it as a DXF As the plugin on the lite version wasn’t working properly.. although did have scale problems at first. Once i sorted that I found out that Sketchup doesn’t export 2 arch’s or circles properly ... so I then had to export my 2d drawing as a 3d DXF file. but it finally all worked :-)