Games Engine Alternatives

Arnold55tree

Hi all, I've been enjoying Chip Walter's article on the front page of Sketchucation;

"How to go from SketchUp to Unity using PBR materials"

This looks great, I think I could learn this but I've been wondering if there is a similar workflow with Unreal Engine? Friends are telling me UE would be better than Unity, but that would only be true if there were an established path like the one Chip demonstrates.

kaas

At the moment you have a few options going from SketchUp to Unreal;

export as obj and import into Blender for creating a second uv channel. The second uv channel will be used in Unreal to store the lightmaps (shadow, color bleeding - all the nice pre-calculated stuff).
export as fbx (or obj) directly to Unreal and use Unreal's option to create the 2nd uv channel (create lightmaps-option during import). This only works well for simple basic shapes.
export as fbx (or obj) directly to Unreal and only use real time lighting and effects. If I remember correctly, the KiteDemo (2015) was done entirely with realtime lighting.
I haven't tried this route (yet) so don't know it this will work for interior scenes as well.
For KiteDemo see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwuFd5uK_xQ

juju

Also take a look at PlayUp as exporter to Unity / Unreal Engine (and a some other engines).

When exporting from SketchUp to Blender, also consider BlendUp exporter. Note that this could be confused with another Blender plugin also called BlendUp which supposedly adds behaviour similar to SketchUp in Blender (but I have no experience with this).

filibis

Hi Arnold55tree,
I'm also in the learning/testing phase for SketchUp to Unity/UE.

Agreeing with kaas and juju, in addition to them; the most elaborate discussion and proper workflow i've seen is at Unreal Engine forums in this thread (by maxbrown https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?69976 . I highly recommend reading the whole thread, because some small steps explained there made the difference for me.

His workflow for complex objects in brief:
Sketchup > obj > blender > add uvs > fbx > UE.

One can't really say UE or Unity is better than each other. Both have pros and cons. Just try them both and test your workflow, then decide yourself. So, don't get on the hype train operated by your friends!

Arnold55tree

Thanks guys, theres a few alternatives and I'll look at each. Not to discount Unity but I suspect that it will end up being influenced by the fact that I have friends with a good knowledge of both Unreal Engine and Blender which will likely give me a boost and save time.