Collada mesh problem
-
One virtual world allows collada file uploads for content. There's some issues involving files that SketchUp exports. Any thought on what's causing a lot of very, very small meshes, the mesh acting as if it were partially exploded, the extra vertices, the extra textures, and what can be done to prevent these from occurring?
Runitai Linden said about SketchUp at SLCC, during The Future of Mesh presentation: "We have a list of applications we test against. Blender ... we wanna make sure we're compatible with Wings3D ... and 3D Studio and Maya because they're the big players from Autodesk. ... and Zebra. You'll notice that I didn't say SketchUp, and that's intentional. SketchUp's exporter creates content that just isn't very efficient for the Second Life importer. You end up with a lot of very, very small meshes, and there's a lot of overhead in Second Life for each individual mesh object."
Besides the numerous small meshes, people importing in Blender to export mention having to clean up the numerous extra vertices. Some texturing in SketchUp to upload instead of importing in another program to texture mention about it causing mesh issues as follows.
When you rotate a texture on a face, SketchUp interprets that as a new material, and saves it as a secondary texturable surface. When you get it into SL, you'll now have "2 textures" on the cube.It causes a problem if you're building a semi-complex object, with let's say 10 sides. The max number of "faces" (textures) that a mesh in SL can have, is 8. So even if you're using the same texture over and over again, and just scaling and rotating it, it can unexpectedly create more than 8 faces in the mesh... resulting in the mesh uploading as "more than one part".
Another issue about the mesh that after uploading it's not grouped as a single mesh, with or without textures. It doesn't matter if you exporting the model "as is", make the entire model into a group before exporting, or make the entire model into a component before exporting. If you click on the mesh then try to move it, only a small part follows, leaving the rest behind, as if it were partially exploded.
-
I'd suggest the following.
export the mesh from SU as OBJ using TIG's OBJ exporter.
import that into Wings3D. in there, select the entire mesh and do a weld and combine. export that out as DAE.that should work.. (it does for moving meshes to Poser)
-
I came across issues with SketchUP's Collada exports when trying to export models for Crysis. I read various statements that their (Google's) Collada format was 100% standard but it never worked for me (or, presumably, for anyone else).
I ended up using the OBJ exporter ---> Blender, who's Collada export worked with no problems.I'd love to see both SketchUP's Collada export actually work and also more programs to use Collada. It seems like it could be a really good format and it's not proprietary. There are always work-arounds, but it'd be nice if you didn't have to resort to them.
-
So the problem is in the collada file exporter instead of the issues with the model's geometry, grouping, and textures? If so, would the simplest workaround be to use a converter like FBX? Or would there be an issue involving reworking/cleanup that would require the file to be imported in another modeler?
Advertisement