Mesh Optimization

[fountainhead]

One thing I find problematic in Sketchup is the deadly 'long skinny triangles' that get created prolifically on planes where smoothly curved edges are employed. These babies are a nightmare when using displacement mapping in a third party renderer. Is there any program that you know of that can be exported to which will allow optimizing of the mesh parameters, maybe even converting to quads where possible, all the while maintaining the UV parameters that were exported out with Sketchup? MOI has an excellent mesh modifier built-in, but no UV capabilities, or compatible file formats with SketchUp exports.

[bytor]

Coen,

That is an extremely usefull tip, and the animated tutorial is a very concise explanation of the process. I knew all of the steps and tools you used, but never thought to combine them that way to clean up imported geometry. Thanks again - I am flagging that as a keeper!

Bytor

[dylan]

@unknownuser said:

What's Rosepoint?

I wondered that also. Sounds as though it should be a next generation Intel cpu or something

[fountainhead]

That was an interesting tutorial, what I am referring to however is meshing prior to export, not after import. If I make a plane with curves in it in Sketchup, selecting 'hidden geometry' shows nothing except for the plane boundary. When you export however, a rendering program then shows the massive triangulation (or not so massive, depending on the vertices in the curves specified in Sketchup)that Sketchup has decided as the best way to polygon the surface. The imported mesh model that is shown on the clip is optimized as far as uniform distribution and shape of the polygons...a model created in Sketchup never has this uniform distribution, that is what I was hoping to be able to do, create a uniform mesh in Sketchup prior to export. You can manually divide the plane into a more uniform distribution of polys by simply adding lines, but unfortunately then your texture UV mapping controls only work on the individual manually created polys and not the plane as a whole...really ugly.