Saving Sweet Home 3D files as DWG files

[Trav]

Over the past several months I have been using Sweet Home 3D to create draft plans for my home renovation & would like to send the files to an acquaintance who is studying architecture so that he can view my files using his CAD program. He said that if I send the files to him in .dwg format he would be able to open them using his software. Is it possible to save Sweet Home 3D files as DWG files? If so how is it done? Thank you.

[hansmex]

Trav,

The short answer is "No".

The long answer is "Yes".
1 - you export your plan using 3D view --> Export to OBJ format
2 - you then import your OBJ file in a program like; Blender;
3 - in Blender you export your model to DWG format.

Be prepared that you may loose some details, but it's worth a try.

Hans

[Trav]

Many thanks Hans. I will give it a go.
Paul

[Puybaret]

Paul, please tell us how it worked out after your tests.

[whippetsleek]

I have used both Blender, and Sketch up to make obj files into dwg files, and they both work very nicely. Sketch though has to have a plug in downloaded for it from the Google plug in page, in order to import and export the file formats. Blender does a better job, but it harder to learn to use.

[Trav]

I have a 64 bit PC and it appears I am not able to use Blender at this stage. The following has been taken directly from the Blender website.

Windows 64 bits

(no installer yet)

Blender 2.49b Zip Archive (13.5 MB)

Requires Windows XP/Vista/7 64bit
USA | Germany | NL 1 | NL 2
Note: This version requires Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistribution Package (x64). (about 5MB)
The 64bit release of Blender for Windows is still in a development stage: it doesn't support all possible features yet, like FFMPEG, OpenAL and Quicktime.

[nicksoper]

Hi All,

I too have had the same issue, and this thread pops up in the search results for the problem.

I found a fairly simple work around. If you export the files to .SVG, then convert to a .PDF (Adobe Illustrator can do it), there is an online tool that converts the .PDF to a .DWG file.

This is the link to the online tool http://www.convertpdftoautocad.com/

Just so you know, I don't work for or own the website, the upload failed in Safari (I had to use Firefox) and I also don't know how good a job it does. I sent the file to an architect to check. If it's rubbish I will reply, but if I don't then give the method a go.

============================================

@hansmex on a separate note, I could not get the latest version of Blender to export to OBJ, and it seems the link to the plugin to extend the functionality to export to DWG on the Blender site is broken

[Trav]

[:-/] Hi Nick Please advise how to export an .sh3d file to .SVG. As I do not have Adobe Illustrator is there an alternative way of converting the .SVG file to a .PDF file?

Thank you
Trav

[Trav]

Hi again Nick

I have discovered how to export the file to .SVG, but still need the other information if that is possible.

Many thanks
Trav

[Puybaret]

What about using PDFCreator? It acts like a printer but the printed result is a PDF file.