The nice thing about the LDraw format is that it’s is widely used by Lego CAD tools out there (including LeoCAD, MLCad, …) and is really easy to parse. It’s funny you should mention it, as it was my experiments with LDraw that made me start experimenting with SketchUp. I do actually have a basic LDraw 3D printer working, albeit with an inventory which currently only supports 2×2 and 2×4 bricks. I must complete and share this so that people can add their own elements to the inventory.

I did something inspired by your Sketchup hack too, although instead of using polygons, i used higher level SL primitives (cube, sphere, cylinder ect) drawn from a component library in Sketchup. A ruby script in Sketchup exports it to a text file in a very simple format (prim type, position, scale, rotation, color), and its imported in SL using a script that reads it from a notecard. It works really well, and Sketchup is a great way of mocking up a model and getting the initial dimensions right. Watching the script construct your objects is a lot of fun too (the “3d printer”).

It struck me then, you could write something very similar for things like Lego Models (designed with LegoCAD or LDraw or other tools) or Anker Building Blocks (AnkerCAD), because those high level entities would translate easily into SL prims or objects.

I had a lot of fun writing it, and perhaps one day, ill write it up and make it available on a web page 🙂 Ultimately though, i think prim.blender is much much better, since it has full support for all the SL primitives and their settings. The Sketchup component library im using is also pretty basic, and Sketchup will never be able to support settings like “sheer” or “hollow” at design time.