Jellyfish
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Well I bit the bullet and got subscribed with Lynda.com(like the whole vaping thing where I spent a fortune at the start so I was forced to continue, spending money on tutorials will guarantee one actually uses them, free stuff is easy to give up on), gotta say Lynda tutorials are great, I just got the beginner stuff, nothing crazy, watched them all once, now going through a second time following all lessons so hopefully it sticks in my head. I hardly ever use shortcut keys as I have a navigator mouse which is pretty useless with Blender as there are just too many shortcuts to program, now I need to learn the keys and where everything is hidden. I must say however once you get going Blender is not as scary as I once thought.
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That's great news!
I'd also recommend checking out BlenderGuru. He has some tuts I'd know you would like.
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@rich o brien said:
That's great news!
I'd also recommend checking out BlenderGuru. He has some tuts I'd know you would like.
I certainly will, once I get the basics, I had a hard time figuring out how to get out of the render window back into 3D edit mode.
Setting up camera's right now has me frustrated, I know, it's early days, however I was able to make a fluid particle flow into a tea cup (my 3D priorities need to be reevaluated)
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Hit N to bring up the panel and set Lock Camera to View
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Rich, is Blender able to import SU components as instances? Saw a mate do that with C4D last week, via collada. Pretty nifty. If Blender could do that ... I might take a closer look at the app.
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Hi Tom,
Exporting as .dae from SketchUp with Component Hierarchy checked will bring components into Blender.
When imported into Blender the vertices are unwelded usually so hit TAB to go into Edit Mode, Hit A to select all geometry and the hit W to bring up Specials menu and choose Remove Doubles.
That will fix any issues with the geometry.
NOTE - Nested Components are not supported. If you import something that is nested then you'll get Empties. I think it has to do with how SketchUp places Component Axis and I haven't found a work around yet. Well, I have but it is a bit involved.
But when you import top level components there's no problem.
Top Tip - Because Blender names everything Instance-## it can get annoying trying to select components. But all you need to do is select the component you want to target and hit SHIFT+L to select it's Linked objects.
Then hit ALT+J to remove Tris and you are ready to UV Map and texture.
Hope that helps
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It does.
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Archimesh for Blender, looks pretty cool and free.
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Check out Sverchok. Grasshopper for Blender.
It'd be nice to have a Blender/SketchUp workshop at Basecamp.
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@rich o brien said:
Check out Sverchok. Grasshopper for Blender.
It'd be nice to have a Blender/SketchUp workshop at Basecamp.
Will do thanks.
I hope by the time of Base camp I will be fluent with Blender.
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The good thing about Blender is that Thea Render plugin is becoming mature, I have yet to try it as right now I'm still learning basics, but I'd love to see how it stacks up against Cycles with speed and quality, I do however kinda like the node system of Cycles.
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Cycles is slow compared to Thea.
What is super flexible about Cycles though is the Integrator.
Instead having say 10 samples per material you can define the samples for each attribute.
Got a highly glossy scene? Then up the glossy samples. Or need more definition in the shadows then bump up its samples.
No need to have global samples constantly extending render times. Target what needs baking.
I'm not advocating that you drop SU but I do think Blender makes you a better modeler because it forces you to reteach yourself and lose the typical SU approach.
I now model in SU completely different because of Blender.
Plus, I have a very solid pipeline in exporting and importing that respects Blender quads and SU quads.
What would make my day in SU is faster imports. Waiting 10mins for something to import is unacceptable. That and the fact that it's exporters consistently fail to export is another major problem. Your recent PM file is a classic example of that.
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