72 CHAPTER 5: IMPORTING CAD FILES In my digital art bin, SketchUp is the tool of choice for visualizing and com- municating ideas in three dimensions, which makes it an incredibly useful tool throughout all stages of the design and building process. When combined with the companion program Layout, SketchUp is inching closer to offering a viable standalone replacement software for other CAD drafting tools. Together they can pretty much get the job done for smaller-scale projects, such as finish carpentry projects, set designs, and kitchen and bath projects--but for projects that require full-scale construction documents, such as ground-up commercial or residential projects, SketchUp probably won't meet all your needs. Working with CAD data in SketchUp presents a number of challenges, such as getting the files in good shape, managing layers, and working with curves and contours--all of which I'll discuss in this chapter. There's also the issue of exporting CAD files from SketchUp, but we'll get to that a bit later in Chapter 10. C HOOSING CAD I MPORT O PTIONS NOTE Even if you're using a program for drafting other than AutoCAD, you can probably export your drawings in AutoCAD format (DWG or DXF). If your drafting program has an option to export to SketchUp's SKP format, just use that instead and skip this section. Opening a non-native CAD file in SketchUp is an easy process, but you can avoid some headaches if you take a little care when bringing in the file. Let's look at each of the import options that SketchUp provides. To import a CAD file, select Import from the File menu. Then choose the option in the File Format drop-down menu for "AutoCAD Files ( .dwg, .dxf)" (Figure 5.1). Figure 5.1 Importing AutoCAD files.