I’ve gotten good at converting Sketchup models in Rhino, thanks largely to this forum. Exploding the blocks, purging all the block references, rebuilding the meshes, merging the coplanar faces. It’s eventually started to become fairly smooth. I need to export the Rhino models for colleagues to plac…

Thanks very much Parker. I got failure and error messages running that script as it was, but I put into ClaudeAI and (after about 9 iterations) I got a version which converts non-block polysurfaces and meshes into blocks. It leaves blocks as they are, as one would want. Through the process I got on…

Those are objects originally created in Sketchup, then opened in Rhino as we pass projects back and forth.

Ok, so this is the result in Sketchup after one pass. Nice improvement? [image] What is a component and what is not is another level of organization. Like this ceiling model above that we could take round trip from Sketchup > Rhino > Sketchup and it help together well. These models should not …

Thankyou Scott. One pass of what operation? Are the objects not automatically exploded into individual polygons once they’re translated to a .skp file? If not then we’re getting somewhere!

At this point Blocks (Components in Sketchup) need to be used to keep objects selectable and independent of other objects. Take the attached SKP file and read it in with these settings: [image] It will come in as Blocks/Instances and proper Mesh formatting (include Ngons and welded vs unwelded f…

Thanks Scott, will experiment. Is it the exporting of grouped objects which we can expect will lead to the disjointed mesh chaos?

Yes, we would expect less “disjointed mesh chaos”. But in Sketchup, all faces automatically interacts with any other geometry unless separated into a group or component. This is called “sticky geometry” in the vernacular. So to separates a set of faces into what we would define as an object, there…

We have a test version of Rhino that can export SKP files using groups and components. If you own Rhino 8 you can download this Rhino 9 WIP Windows build to test. The new SKP will wrap all objects in Rhino as a group in Sketchup. This will allow the complete selection of the objects in Sketchup. …

Thanks Scott. This is great to hear. We can’t use WIP in our regular workflow for fear of hitting an impasse on one of our many critical deadlines, but it might be smart to install the WIP (if it can be done without compromising R8’s performance for certain tasks.) We have the Python script though w…

I would like to see the SKP file that shows the separate block instance issues. In general the instances and block are coming in as expected. Although I expect there are situations that they get renamed, but an SKP example would help. Are they dynamic components? Are they nested? [image] Dyna…

Rhino 9 can be installed, it will have no effect on Rhino 8. Use it just to test SKP import would be helpful.

Sketchup to Rhino

Scripting

brian (Brian Gillespie) October 1, 2025, 11:46pm 39

RH-89556 is fixed in Rhino WIP

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Sketchup to Rhino

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