Just picked it up...And also posted a thread on another part of the forum(matireals section)MY BAD I am going through the tutorials on the site and also on there forums. I hope i can show off some new textures somtime next week.(If i can learn it soon enough) Gigga97

I recently noticed that Meshlab will do this as well, although (DAE>3DS) components need to be exploded first in the SketchUp model before export as GE4 KMZ. http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ Actually, I just did a test and found a problem with SketchUp components with a direct import of a KMZ-derived Collada into Blender as well...all components have their scale reset, and sometimes their orientation(?) seems to have changed. Seems like the workaround here would also be to explode every group and component in the SU model before exporting to KMZ. And my textures were removed from the model, although since they are packaged in the original KMZ folder it should be possible to reassociate them in Blender easily enough. Or maybe not so easily, if you don't understand Blender's texture mapping tools. Also, Blender has a display limitation (similar to SketchUp's infamous "clipping error") in the unit dimensions of a scene...chances are that you need to scale any architecture-size SketchUp model down, considerably, before export so that it will be visible properly in Blender.

Excellent resources guys. Thanks

Looks great, Csaba. I'll try it out. If I can park short videos there then I'll be able to do tutorials with Camtasia for the Newbie forum.

Why don't you just link directly to DAZ 3D Studio..??

Thanks John! It's very useful app.

Do you mean the plugin by jim? if so it can be found here

That would be me, sir. This tool is really useful.

Peter, It's just a way to transfer stuff from raster to vector. It's always going to involve some clean-up. If the original drawing isn't even to scale though it's probably useless. I'm drawing up parts of a large steel sculpture, all originally drawn accurately to scale. Vectorising the drawings is relatively effortless and accurate enough for the contractor.

The best natural simple painting : Art Rage

Oh God .... not another piece of software that will take up valuable time exploring Just kidding, it looks to be a useful program and I was delighted to see a Mac version there, thanks Jon Mike

Well dwg will hold 3d surfaces but if Inventor is anything like Autocad you might have to tidy up the model a bit once you've imported it. Alternatively you could try exporting as 3DS file, the program below will convert 3ds for inventor. The workflow issue you might have, and I'm guessing here, is that Inventor (if it's similar to Autocad) might be more suited to solid modelling data, not surfaces/faces like SU. http://www.softpedia.com/get/Science-CAD/3DS-Import-for-Inventor.shtml I'm not in any way an expert on file types though, I'm sure somebody here will give you some better advice. I'm always up early, definately the best part of the day, but yes, I do have a deadline for tomorrow, not too pressurised though.

All hail the Magic Conch! [image: NVGF_Conch.jpg]

I am trying to learn Blender, I know it's complicated but I reckon its worth learning simply because it's free. I'm doing this course, it's free and accredited by M.I.T http://ocw.tufts.edu/Course/28 The next release is supposed to feature a major gui facelift to make blender more like 3ds max.

Also there's Sqirlz Morph. See a funny example here.

@wikii said: why not SciTE + SU bridge from TBD? I think you are referring to Notepad++ in the other thread... I use that because I feel most comfortable with it... I find TBD's things a bit too 'professional' for me. I just dabble. I wrote a lot of early ruby stuff with Notepad.exe after all...