Faces with holes disappear on export, and other export woes.
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I realise it's bad modelling practise to model faces with holes, but I always thought that was something to do with animation. I have a lot of windows on this house and every single wall that has a window disappears when I export the model in a .dae format.
I'm sure people have modelled Sketchup houses for external use before, and I have to assume they have windows. How am I meant to do it?
This is going into a game engine, so another somewhat related question is that now I realise a rounded window creätes a huge number of triangles. Is there a standard way of doing this more cleanly?
And finally, when I look at the model in Maya or Unreal Engine 4, seemingly no matter which export options I choose, there is a great amount of Z-fighting, as if all my faces were doubled (I've tried both ticking and unticking the option to export two-sided faces). In fact, I can click on pretty much any face (in Maya, not Sketchup) and delete it to reveal one beneath it and eliminate the Z-fighting. And then I need to reverse the face usually. And yes, my whole model has only the white side exposed.
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Share the file or a portion of it.
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.dae exported fine for me...
as regard triangulation around ngons. it's unavoidable unless you model from the beginning without ngons.
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Thanks very much.
What programme is that? I can't get it into Maya or UE4 without looking like a right mess. But the exporter says no-thing about it.
About the ngons, how do people normally do windows? especially rounded ones?
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MooTools 3D Browser
People normally find the optimal pipeline for bringing an asset from one app to another.
If the .dae fails to import then the problem is likely with the importer and not the exporter.
try going through this in various formats to see what works for you.
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Thanks, I've downloaded that one now and it's lovely.
Any advice in that case on getting this file into Maya or UE4 looking the way it does in Open3Mod? (I'm really, really happy that it's not exporting the way I thought it was, you've no idea.)
EDIT: Hadn't realised this thing was a converter as well. Trying that now.
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Thanks. Here it is.
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Wow, it certainly helped. Thanks.
So, now in Maya, all faces with holes appear, but every face in the model is now doubled. I have to tick 'export two-sided faces' in Sketchup or it won't load in Open3Mod. Does Sketchup always export the faces doubled or is this another importer problem? If so, perhaps I ought to find a Maya forum.
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Are your face normals oriented correctly?
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They're all doubled, and they display funny (I'll describe that in a second), so when I tell Maya to display face normals it appears as though every single face, including those that shouldn't be, has its normals facing outwards.
The first image is the way the .obj file looks normally in Maya (once 'display face normals' is on).
The second is what happens once I click on the model.
The third is what happens once I deselect the model.
The fourth is what happens once I move the camera in any way, reverting it back to the way it looks in the first image.
Now, what's happening is every face is doubled, and the face that's immediately visible is facing the correct way, which I found by deleting faces and watching the normal indicator disappear, whilst the doubled face is orientated the opposite way, as if to represent what in SketchUp is by default the blue material.
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If you export single sided what happens? Can you flip the normals if they come in reversed?
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If I export single-sided as .dae Maya just almost can't even reckon the model (portions of it don't display depending on the camera view, and I can't check at the moment but I believe that was one of the settings that had Maya import single faces as tripled and quadrupled causing Z-fighting all over it), and of course the faces with holes don't import, as you'd expect. If I try to open this single-sided file in Open3Mod it gives an error and won't open it.
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I'm outta advice in afraid.
Considering the money u pumped into Maya I'd flag the bug.
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Thanks a lot, my friend. I'll have a go from the Maya side of advice. I don't think it's a bug, though. I've always been warned against modelling faces with holes. I just thought that was for when a model would deform in animations, but it seems that was a misconception on my part.
I'll talk to them anyway, and if it's a bug I'll find out.Thanks for all your help.
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Always triangulate in SketchUp if you can.
Most other apps don't really like Ngons.
So it is has to generate its own tris then your at its mercy as to the result.
If you find a fix post it.
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I've never had much of a problem with ngons in Maya or UE4, unless animating (and of course UE4 will triangulate on import, but it seems to do it well). When I triangulate in Sketchup, unless this is a mistake I'm making for having done it so many times with so many settings, it seems to make far more triangles than necessary. One time I had it in Maya with about 20K tris, and now after triangulating in Sketchup it's 60K. Now, this could be for the error of the doubled faces, and the fact that I don't think at that time (when it was 20K in Maya) I had the faces with holes appearing. If that's the trouble then Sketchup's triangulating fine.
Whatever happens I'll post back here. And something will happen. I'm working on this since January and it's for a game I'm making, so I'll have this sorted one way or another.
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I know in Modo that its triangulation has the ability to divide an edge so the triangulation is cleaner.
SketchUp doesn't so you need to divide edges manually.
I've never used Maya or Max so maybe they're not liking the double faces.
Are you able to merge vertices in Maya to remove doubles?
I've seen in Blender on some collada imports that a plane that should consist of 4 verts, 5 edges and 2 faces. Actually be 12 verts. Just saying.
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Maya hates double faces. I don't know any modelling programme that likes them. There's meant to be an option to remove them but it's not working. I'll go to their forum or maybe PolyCount and see what can I find out. I'll let you (and the world) know when I know.
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Just thought I'd tell everyone we found no fix as such, but someone else on the team has the pro version of SketchUp and that has the export options we needed.
I don't understand the incompatibility between all these programmes but at least I have my problem sorted.
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