Importing SketchUp 7 Files Into Blender

[irakrakow]

Yeah, I noticed the problem with empties when I tried to export the Bench from SketchUp 7 into Blender. Blender coughs on empties. One of the arms of the bench ended up dangling. The model can't be scaled. The empties are parented to some of the meshes that make up the total bench. Exploding the components is absolutely a must.

I wonder how the scaling works in Google Earth with a model scaled in miles (or kilometers). Maybe trying to import a model of the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, or the Taj Mahal will produce good results. Come to think of it, I tried a Taj Mahal model export and had to fiddle a lot with the camera to get the model to display at all.

This is great research. It should make our lives much more easier when creating realistic scenes and games.

[cxevalo]

i tried exporting the standard cube from blender as a .dae and got an error about an index overflow exporting game engine data I looked at the export script and that line is the start of a class defination.

So then i tried exporting the cube as a .3ds file. That got me a charactor coding error om line 10. I looked at the file, line ten is the author credits line and there was nothing odd about it. so i deleted it and blank line 9. Did an export selected. That worked. i got a 2" cube in SU. The SU cube has an extra diagonal edge on each face.

so until someone feels like prusuing the problem with the blender .dae exporter just delete lines 9 and 10 and go with .3ds .

[cxevalo]

i made a model with su that i want to use in a game. I exported it and imported it as above then scaled it to my blend size. I did a lot of modifications to the file as far as the geometry goes uvmaped it and got good renders
but----- when i go into game mode p key as soon as i get a certain distance from the object it disappears. if i walk into it i get stopped at the right place.

what could cause this?

[irakrakow]

Probably it's the camera. You want to set up a camera actuator with the always sensor, follow it about 4 blender units from above, and then you won't lose track of your object. You also might consider multiple cameras. I'll do a video about camera use in the BGE at some point.

[cxevalo]

After bashing my head on the wall off and on for several days i finally found the problem. I didn't have the world button set.You have to add a world for things to work right with the game engine. I don't know what that adds, but without a world things are really freaky in the game.

I have made several models with su for use with blender. there are some things that are quicker to do with su. But you can get some really odd geometry as far as where the edges are and which way the normals point. I usually have to spend some time rearranging things in order to get something reasonable to unwrap.

the units conversion is i" in su is 1 blender unit in blender.

[irakrakow]

The geometry definitely is the key. SketchUp makes a lot of triangles. You need a lot of cleanup if you're going to use edge loops and quads to make a clean mesh. For objects that you're not going to change much in Blender, though, why not use SketchUp.

[cxevalo]

I have been making models in su. but they all have problems and need clean up. I don't think it is sketch that is causing the problem directly but the export import process seems to hake a hash of the normals so thing have to be fixed one face at a time sometimes.