Unwrapping in Max and keeping SU textures?

[Janor]

Hopefully someone can help me with this, it's a road block I run into every time I start to get serious with modelling in SketchUp.

What I'm trying to do is both model and texture my mesh in SketchUp. Now I have no issues there, it's easy as pie, and when I export the mesh into 3DS Max it appears just fine, even with it's textures intact. No problems so far.

Expect...that the model has no UVs, which means it's completely useless. No problem, I'll just slap some UVs on it inside 3DS Max, and there's my issue. Unwrapping the model throws the texture positions and rotations off.

Is there any way to unwrap the model inside Max but somehow keep the texture positions I spent so much time tweaking inside SketchUp intact?

[andybot]

how are you exporting? Have you tried using obj exporter? 3ds format seems particularly useless for keeping texture info.

[Janor]

Usually just open the actual .skp file in Max. That or FBX. Exporting to Max isn't the problem though.

[andybot]

I'm not sure the max importer does a good job with (sketchup) UV's. Why are you asking the question otherwise? Maybe there's a trick to convert the SU mesh in 3ds?

edit: considering the many difficulties in UV editing in SU is why I suggest a different import method.

[Janor]

Easier to describe my problem with a picture.

What I want is for the texture to look like it does normally but with UV maps properly laid out.

Unless I'm missing an obvious solution it's looking to me like SU's texture tools are just "for show" and have no real use outside of SketchUp itself =\

[andybot]

@janor said:

Unless I'm missing an obvious solution it's looking to me like SU's texture tools are just "for show" and have no real use outside of SketchUp itself =\

That sounds about right You can see for example all the difficulty all the rendering plugins have with some of the funkier aspects of SU UV mapping.
That's why I suggest using the obj exporter, it converts the SU mapping to something more usable by other programs (in my case Blender)

[Gaieus]

Are you actually positioning those textures in SU (say right click > position - and then copy the positioned texture onto other faces) or just "paint" it? Properly positioning the materials should assign them proper UV coordinates that the exporters can get through (I do not know Max's importer though)

[Janor]

No I haven't been so thanks for that. I generally scale and position them face by face, I didn't even know you could copy the texture positions across like that.

On exporting into Max now the resulting UVs do look a lot better (they match the mesh now at least), but they are way too large and extend well beyond the UV layout window. Scaling them down throws the tiling of the bricks off.

Getting close now at least.

[Rich O Brien]

Scaling them down within the UV space in Max will mean they now are the size of the imported texture.

If you import the .skp into Max it will contain a 512px x 512px brick texture that is filling your UV space. So if you unwrap and arrange then you are effectively placing geometry within the 512 x 512 texture thus it will increase the brick size.