Exporting models from Sketchup to 3DXchange

Hi everybody. I thought I'd share some of the things I have learned while modelling in Sketchup. I realise there are some who go ewww! not Sketchup. But for those who want to quickly create content for Iclone (3D Warehouse aside) Sketchup is a RDT (Rapid Development Tool) which I use predominantly for my content. Remembering of course Sketchup is one of many tools I have in my toolbox and should be seen for what it is, a tool.


Ok. One of the problems with Sketchup is when you assign textures to faces in Sketchup, there is a tendency that Sketchup will create a texture for each object, i.e. 4 materials and 44 textures, which is causes prop import times in 3DXchange and Iclone to be long and tiring, and you sometimes think the apps have crashed.

I found this out when working on the Hearse for my Mortuary set scene. The spokes on the wagon wheels are individual objects, but they are all painted with the same material/texture in Sketchup. However in Iclone/3DXchange when I wanted to add specular lighting to the spokes i had to do each one individually because Sketchup's export to OBJ or FBX assigns the texture to each part.

The Remedy:
This is annoying, but one way to assure that, for example, 4 materials and 4 textures used in Sketchup are what you will end up with in Iclone.

1. create and texture your model in Sketchup
2. Rename all materials to the name of the texture (this makes it easier to know what texture belongs to what material)
3. On exporting the model as FBX or obj, depending upon your preference go to Options on the export dialog window. I also ensure Triangulate all faces is checked too.
4. Export the model.
5. Import the model into 3DXchange
6. Assign the textures to their counterpart materials (the renaming in step 2. helps here, particularly on large complex models)
7. Assign opacity, bump etc textures to the appropriate channels.
8. Export the model to Iclone.

Hope this helps

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Facebook Page: CWK3D Game and Film Content
Cancer Survivor - Retired Teacher - Geriatric Icloner still learning
Hardware: ZX80; Operating System- ZX80 Basic; CPU - ZX80 @ 3.25 MHz; Memory - 1KB; Hard Drive - N/A; Storage - Cassette; Monitor: Any old CRT TV

Thank you for sharing the nice outline.

I hope I can find it again when I need it. 

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Hi justaviking, I added the link to my signature. I will be adding to this from time to time
Cheers
Bob

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Facebook Page: CWK3D Game and Film Content
Cancer Survivor - Retired Teacher - Geriatric Icloner still learning
Hardware: ZX80; Operating System- ZX80 Basic; CPU - ZX80 @ 3.25 MHz; Memory - 1KB; Hard Drive - N/A; Storage - Cassette; Monitor: Any old CRT TV

Not to put a damper on things, but, the OBJ and FBX export options are only available in the "PRO" versions of SketchUp.

The rest of us will have to continue using the SKP file format for our work.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

There are a couple of OBJ exporters available to Sketchup free users :
wavefront-obj-exporter.

Or

Obj export plugin (registration on forum may be required)


And to import obj files (exported from 3DXchange:
Obj import

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Facebook Page: CWK3D Game and Film Content
Cancer Survivor - Retired Teacher - Geriatric Icloner still learning
Hardware: ZX80; Operating System- ZX80 Basic; CPU - ZX80 @ 3.25 MHz; Memory - 1KB; Hard Drive - N/A; Storage - Cassette; Monitor: Any old CRT TV

Thanks for the links Bob, and I have a question. Since 3DXchange can convert SKP models, what are the advantages of using OBJ files out of SketchUp?

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

Hi Gerry. I discovered raw Sketchup files imported in to 3DXchange suffer from the problem mentioned in the first post. A saved Sketchup file often assigns a texture toeach object rather than share the texture with multi objects using the same material. I have found this slows model/prop load up into Iclone. It doesn't happen all the time, particularly of simple models, but when I was making the hearse it ended up with 10 materials but 105 texture instances. By exporting as an obj without exporting the textures I was able to reduce the textures to the 10 materials, thus making load up into Iclone a lot quicker.
Hope that helps
Cheers
Bob

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See all my content in one place

Facebook Page: CWK3D Game and Film Content
Cancer Survivor - Retired Teacher - Geriatric Icloner still learning
Hardware: ZX80; Operating System- ZX80 Basic; CPU - ZX80 @ 3.25 MHz; Memory - 1KB; Hard Drive - N/A; Storage - Cassette; Monitor: Any old CRT TV

SketchupUV is free, so you Sketchup users have now excuse not to UV your models

http://smustard.com/script/SketchUV

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See all my content in one place

Facebook Page: CWK3D Game and Film Content
Cancer Survivor - Retired Teacher - Geriatric Icloner still learning
Hardware: ZX80; Operating System- ZX80 Basic; CPU - ZX80 @ 3.25 MHz; Memory - 1KB; Hard Drive - N/A; Storage - Cassette; Monitor: Any old CRT TV

Thanks for that CK! This will help a lot...

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Thanks for the tip CK.

When I get the hang of it

maybe I can start to write

short sentences using different coloured text.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.