Making my SKP file printable

Getting a Google SketchUp file into a 3D printer is not as straight-forward as one might hope. The geometry produced by SketchUp (SKP from now on) is inherently "not solid," and as we all may or may not know, geometry must be solid to print in 3D. One of the great benefits of using SKP is that a user does not have to worry about making sure all objects are solid and/or well formed. This is very nice and makes things quicker, until it comes time to print a SKP model. Now we have all kinds of problems. Nothing is solid, and there could be holes in the SKP model that are very hard to discover (see images below).
So....what do we do? One option would be to go through the SKP model and make sure that all edges are snapped together, and that the model is "water-tight." On a simple model, sure, no problem. On a complex model like a large, residential project, this task becomes quite daunting. Building a solid object in the shape of a complex house, triangle-by-triangle, would take forever. Manually creating an STL file is not recommended by the author. Simply converting the SKP geometry to an STL might work, depending upon the shapes used to create the model, but usually will result in a large number of non-unified shells that have individual errors. The individual shells will not boolean together nicely since they are not solid, and again we are drawing triangle-by-triangle, which would take forever to complete a large house.
Enter CADspan. Simply patch all the holes with simple stitching (line tool), run the file through CADspan, and you will get a resurfaced version of your SKP geometry as one solid object. Voila! Ready to go. No worry about making the individual parts of the building solid, just make sure that the entire model is closed, with an inside and an outside easily determined, and CADspan will do the rest. SKP to 3D printer, no problem.
For more, check out the book on processing Google SketchUp Files for 3D Printing, and the Google SketchUp forum here at 3DPC.

hole1_location.jpg

hole1.jpg