Export SketchUp to DWG: 2D drawing or 3D model?

You clicked Export, and either nothing came out the way the other side expected or nothing came out at all. By the end of this you will know which of the two exports your recipient needs, what every option in that dialog does to the file, and why a model that draws instantly can take an age to write out.

Work out whether the other side needs a drawing or a model.

SketchUp stacks two completely different exports in the same menu, under names that sound almost the same. That is the biggest single cause of a DWG that gets sent back.

File > Export > 2D Graphic writes flat lines based on your current camera position. File > Export > 3D Model writes your geometry as it sits in space. SketchUp's help is blunt about what happens to faces on the way out: they are exported as a triangulated polyface mesh with interior hidden lines. That is not a fault, it is how the format holds on to your shape. It is also why somebody expecting a floor plan finds a field of triangles.

One question settles it. Does this person need to measure the thing on paper, or build against it in three directions?

Exporting to CAD is a subscription feature, and that is the whole answer.

"Export SketchUp to DWG without pro" is one of the most typed versions of this question, so here it is, without a sales pitch. SketchUp's help states that SketchUp subscribers can import CAD files into their models, and export their models as CAD files for use with other software (Importing and Exporting CAD Files on help.sketchup.com, checked on 8 August 2026). In the free web version, the option is not in the export list at all.

On the SketchUp plans page, "Enhanced IFC and DWG compatibility" is listed against the Pro and Studio plans (SketchUp plans and pricing, also checked on 8 August 2026). That is as far as I will take it.

The workaround people reach for instead deserves a warning. Online SKP to DWG converters cost nothing and hand back a triangulated lump with no layer structure, and the price is uploading a client's model to a server you know nothing about.

A floor plan or elevation comes out of 2D Graphic, and the camera decides the rest.

Set the camera before you touch the export menu. Skip it and your drawing is wrong in a way nobody spots until it gets dimensioned. SketchUp puts a note directly above the procedure: before exporting, make sure your model is in a Standard Camera view with Parallel projection enabled, which helps make sure the scale is preserved.

Camera > Standard Views > Top
Camera > Parallel Projection

The reason is not mysterious. In perspective, anything further away is drawn smaller, and a 2D export starts from that camera, so the perspective travels straight into the file. Your elevation tapers.

1. Set the camera with Camera > Standard Views and Camera > Parallel Projection.
2. Choose File > Export > 2D Graphic.
3. Pick the folder you want the file in.
4. Select .dwg as the file type, or .dxf if the recipient asked for it.
5. Click Options and work through the five blocks covered in the next section.
6. Click OK to go back to the export dialog.
7. Click Export.

Top gives you the floor plan. Front, Back, Left and Right give you the elevations. For a section, cut the model first and set the camera afterwards.

The Options button is where the drawing is genuinely decided.

Five blocks sit behind that button. Most people accept every default; two of them are worth changing.

Edge extensions are the one that catches people. In SketchUp they are a styling choice that makes lines overshoot slightly and look hand drawn. In CAD they are lines that are slightly too long, and the help warns in plain words that some CAD applications have problems recognising line endpoints and intersections when your model uses them.

Full Scale is worth leaving alone. Export at real size and the recipient scales to their own sheet, which is what they were going to do anyway.

Exporting with layers means sorting out your tags first.

AutoCAD calls them layers, SketchUp calls them tags, same idea. How much control the recipient has is decided before the export, and no option in the dialog rescues a model where everything sits on the default tag. That file opens as one lump of linework.

One thing in the export dialog belongs to this conversation: Separate on a Layer, under Profile Lines, is on by default and creates a layer for profile edges. Useful when you use heavy outlines deliberately. Confusing when you did not know they were there and the recipient asks about a layer you never made.

Model structure carries through too. Put tags on groups and components rather than on loose edges and faces and the organisation survives the trip; which of those two containers to reach for is covered in SketchUp Components vs Groups: When to Use Which.

Then there is what does not travel at all. Hidden geometry, and anything on a tag you switched off, is not in the exported file. That is the whole explanation behind the missing lines email you get two days later. Nothing was lost in transit. It never left.

"Not responding" nearly always means SketchUp is still working.

Windows puts those words in the title bar when an application stops answering the operating system, not when it has crashed. A program calculating in one long stretch stops answering. A CAD export is exactly that kind of job, so the greyed out window is a report on the conversation, not on SketchUp.

So the correct first move is boring: do nothing. Give it real time before you decide it has died, then check whether work is happening.

• Open Task Manager and look at the CPU and disk columns for SketchUp. Steady activity means it is still going.
• Watch the file size in the destination folder. A DWG that keeps growing is a DWG being written.
• Stop clicking. Every click on a frozen window is queued and Windows will offer to close the program for you, which is exactly the wrong option to accept here.
• Do not force quit early unless you are ready to lose everything since your last save.

I once watched an export on a landscaping model sit there long enough to make coffee and question my career, and then finish perfectly. The model had trees. Hundreds of them, from the 3D Warehouse, each one a small mountain of faces. Nothing was broken. It was arithmetic.

If it truly never finishes, the cause is in the next section, not a corrupted install.

A slow export is a geometry problem you can fix before you click.

Here is the mechanism, because knowing it changes what you do about it. Every face is written out as a triangulated polyface mesh with interior hidden lines, so a single rectangle is more than four lines by the time it lands. Curves are segments, and a rounded corner is a fan of faces pretending to be smooth. A model that feels light while you orbit it can be enormous as CAD entities.

Which means the export time is set by entity count, not by how good your machine is. A faster laptop finishes the same silly amount of work slightly sooner.

• Delete or hide what nobody needs: trees, people, cars, the insides of cabinets, the neighbour's building. Biggest win by far, and it takes two minutes.
• Untick Faces in a 3D export to send edges only. The file shrinks dramatically and the recipient can still snap to everything.
• Untick Construction Geometry so your guides stay yours.
• Set Profile Lines to None and turn Show Extensions off, which removes a pile of extra entities as well as a pile of confusion.
• Export in parts: one file per floor. Two clean files beat one nobody can open.
• Prefer .dwg over .dxf when the choice is yours: DXF is an interchange format and tends to produce a bigger file for the same geometry.

Check the entity count in Model Info under Statistics before and after a clean up. Watching that number halve tells you whether the export will be a wait or a click.

A 3D export lets you choose which entity types travel.

The dialog is shorter than the 2D one and the consequences are bigger. Under Options sit the AutoCAD Version and a set of tick boxes for what goes into the file.

1. Choose File > Export > 3D Model and browse to where the file should go.
2. Select .dwg or .dxf as the format.
3. Click Options and set the AutoCAD Version.
4. Tick what should travel from Faces, Edges, Construction Geometry, Dimensions, Text and Materials.
5. Click OK, then Export.

My defaults there: Construction Geometry off, Dimensions and Text off unless somebody asked, Materials on only if the recipient is going to render. SketchUp dimensions and AutoCAD dimensions are not the same animal, and sending them usually creates a tidying job rather than saving one.

Faces is the interesting one. Untick it and you send an edge only model: a wireframe that weighs almost nothing and still lets the recipient snap to every corner. For a contractor who needs positions rather than surfaces, it is often the better file. When the traffic runs the other way, that trip has its own traps, covered in Import DWG into SketchUp without issues.

Still not working? Start from what the other side is seeing.

Five complaints cover almost everything that comes back.

On units, one line from the help explains more failures than it should: SketchUp uses the current unit of measurement as a reference for translation to a .dwg or .dxf file. A model drawn in millimetres but set to inches opens at a size that makes no sense.

If they only wanted something to print or measure on, a PDF gets you there faster, and the CAD side of that job is set out in How to export DWG to PDF in AutoCAD?. If the export option is missing from your menu entirely, that is the subscription question from earlier rather than a broken install, and a paid SketchUp desktop licence puts the item back.

When it still comes out wrong after all that, email us with the SKP file and the exact wording of whatever the recipient sees on screen.

One habit separates the people who never get these emails from the people who get them weekly. Open your own exported DWG in a viewer before you send it, cold, as if you were the recipient. It is the only test that reflects what happens at the other end, and it has caught more of my mistakes than any option in that dialog ever will.