SketchUp game exporter (Source)

kwistenbiebel

@chris fullmer said:

Hmmmm! Maybe one day I'll have to try a game other than space invaders! Seriously yes it's been that long! You guys probably aren't even old enough to know what that is!.

Space Invaders oh yeah. Together with Frogger, Pac Man and Donkey Kong those are great memories...
All played on a commodore 64 and later on the Amiga.
It still sucks the Amiga died somewhere in the early nineties.

Jim

Do a search for Crysis on digitalurban - they did some videos of architectural fly-throughs in the Crysis Sandbox.

The game's physics are very impressive!

plot-paris

wow! they state, that they can import directly from google warehouse - whitch means they support skp-files

kwistenbiebel

They said they would show a how-to more than half a year ago.
Still no tut today.

juju

Holy moly, almost sounds like a good reason to buy Crysis, or the next Far Cry - to get the editors...

Froggery

Wow I'm surprised, I didn't expect to find a post about Playup Tools on Sketchucation. Anyway, I figured I would drop in and let everyone know that we've seen the thread and the interest in the tools. Pretty cool Although I'm sorry we don't currently have support for Unreal or Crytek but I've bumped it up on my list of things to evaluated.

Just know that we started with Halflife Source instead of Unreal, Gamebryo, Crytek, etc.. because the Source tools are terrible and the mod community/user base is large. Unreal also has a large community but its tools are easier to master and Crytek's are even better. As such, we figured a large body of frustrated Half-life mod makers would be a good starting place to develop a user base. But we've always planned to support and augment SketchUp as an editor for the popular game engines.

Thanks again!

plot-paris

well, that is some news!

thanks a lot Froggery. I see a glimpse of a bright feature for SketchUp - and for architects, walking through (messing up ) their building designs for hours, perfectly rendered by the newest game engines

digital urban

@jim said:

Do a search for Crysis on digitalurban - they did some videos of architectural fly-throughs in the Crysis Sandbox.

The game's physics are very impressive!

Hi - thought i would join having seen the link above. I do apologise for the lack of tutorial, the Crysis sandbox had a bug that delayed development and then due to work load we had to move on. We plan to get back to Crysis end of August with that tutorial - you can take any model from the Google 3D Warehouse and import it into Crysis with a few tweaks.

Its a very impressive engine, as i hope the movies on the blog show, so apologies again and the tutorial will go live soon as we get chance

Andy
http://www.digtialurban.blogspot.com

ELYSIUM

This is great news!! I'm a big fan of Half Life and TF2, the Source engine is great, and since i saw this post on Digital Urban (http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/2006/08/frank-lloyd-wright-architectual.html) i've been dreaming on placing sketchup models on Source!
This is really good for Architects also! we can make a model of a building and then walk in it with the customer making it much easier to explain the project and propose changes.

Hey Gaieus what do you think about exporting my Rome model to the Source engine?

Gaieus

I'd love to see that, Pedro!

(Also thinking about my city)

zapwizard

First off, long time forum lurker...but long time sketchup user.

I am very interested in getting a SketchUp to SandBox2 (Crysis) converter working.

If anyone is interested you can convert easy enough from SketchUp in to SandBox2 using XSI ModTool as a in-between.
SandBox2 is free with the Crysis demo (Although you get more with the real-game)
SketchUp free version can be used with the XSI ModTool using Google Earth 4 KMZ files.
And XSI ModTool is free.

I have used SketchUp a few times to bring in basic custom objects into the popular map I made in Crysis.

Text:

Flashlight:

HDTV:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=19058

I have a (Very) basic how-to here:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?postid=178946#post178946

kwistenbiebel

I am aware of the XSI mod tool, but a 'straight-from-Su-to-sandbox' would be sooooo much easier .
For architectural visualisation (photoreal real time walkthroughs!) the newer Crytek Far cry 2 engine will be even better I think.

So yeah, lets vote for game exporters

zapwizard

The XSI mod-tool is about as easy as it gets. All I had to do to get my models in was to tweak the textures names in the XSI tool and then pass it on to SandBox2. I would do more but the plug-in isn't working on my newest PC.

Is should be pretty straight forward for someone to write a model converter as the full SDK for SandBox2 is out. I just have no skills in programming that type of stuff.

FarCry2 does look to have a great engine from the videos, however just FYI the engine is not developed by Crytek, only the license to the story was bought from them.

From a quote on the FarCry2 editor:

@unknownuser said:

We can't ship our real production editor - it's just impossibly complicated - so the version we've built for the public is a very quick and super user-friendly level editor that allows people to build maps for multiplayer very, very quickly in a few hours," said Hocking. "It uses all in-game assets so it's as beautiful as the game, unless you make a giant pillar of rock 500 metres high and don't texture it or something - then it's ugly - but that's up to you.

Where as with CryEngine2 they have a full SDK, and nearly every tool used to actually make Crysis was given out to the public.

Now I know we are not talking about making games here but realistic real world scale visualizations, but I have found nothing that is as easy and powerful as SandBox2.

I have my entire home modeled in SketchUp, I am thinking about making a demonstration map inside SandBox2 using my house as a model in the editor. Also my work is interested in using the game engine to setup virtual walkthroughs that allows a customer to see how our products work inside their home.

I have used SandBox2 combined with Google Earth to make two maps based on real-world terrain.
My first map, called Castaway has the same outline and basic terrain as the island where the movie Castaway was filmed. The island is 1:1 scale with the real-world island, and I used images from Google Earth as reference to paint the terrain.

On the map I am working on now I am actually using eight square km of real-world terrain. Specifically Zion's National park. The terrain is perfect 1:1 scale in elevation using USGS data. The textures is also nearly perfect using 1 meter resolution USGS satellite photos.

Here is the terrain in Google Earth:

Here is the terrain in SandBox2 after only a few hours work:

Chris Fullmer

If you do your house for Crysis, I'd like to see it.

Nice to see Zion's Park. My parents live about an hour in Ivins and I proposed to my wife there (though that was long before my parents lived anywhere near it).

I'd like to see anything for Crysis that you have.

Chris

Richard

@zapwizard said:

First off, long time forum lurker...but long time sketchup user.

I am very interested in getting a SketchUp to SandBox2 (Crysis) converter working.

If anyone is interested you can convert easy enough from SketchUp in to SandBox2 using XSI ModTool as a in-between.
SandBox2 is free with the Crysis demo (Although you get more with the real-game)
SketchUp free version can be used with the XSI ModTool using Google Earth 4 KMZ files.
And XSI ModTool is free.

I have used SketchUp a few times to bring in basic custom objects into the popular map I made in Crysis.

Text:

Flashlight:

HDTV:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=19058

I have a (Very) basic how-to here:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?postid=178946#post178946

Wow mate that is some great stuff!!!

I have to ask is the first island image from a game engine or rendered from elsewhere! All this new game engine speak is completely new to me and I'm not really absorbing it at all. Though I'm listening in to see if amongst my confusion get some hold on it!

Chris Fullmer

Here's the basics of it (as I understand it). I have not been directly involved in creating my own content for games for a few years. Reading back through this, I totally dumbed it down. I'm not trying to be condescending, I was just trying to simplify and give a little background and a fuller explanation. Please don't be offended if you already 99% of this and I'm just repeating known information - this really was written for anyone interested. Hope its helpful as a brief background to this thread.

So Wolfenstein was one of the first 3d first person shoot em up games. It came out in 1991. It had a map editor in which you could take walls and boxes and weapons and stuff from the game and lay them out in your own configuration to make your own level. Back then, you pretty much just took the 3d parts and pieces that the game developers gave you and you arranged them how you wanted.

Today, most 3d games (all?) still have a map editor so you can take the stuff they already made and re-organzie it into a map of your own design. But even cooler are the games that really are letting people add their own content and then place that in to maps of their own making. So You can take the game Crysis for example (which I own but have not played much) and use its content, which is lots of warfare stuff in the jungles I think. But if you want to make a game that is more about Star Trek, you could go model all the star trek spaceships, put materials on them and import them in to the gamed editor. Place them whereever you want on your map, aply the game's physics to them (engines, weight, power, guns, armor, etc), and then you would have an entirely new game about star trek that you would play inside a game that is normally about jungles and combat. This is called modding. Taking a game, and adding enough of your won content and changing the gameplay enough that it essentially becomes its own, new game. There is already a big user base in this, lots of people mod. Most mods suck.

But the ability to import content into a game is so cool because games focus on incredibly fast, high quality real time rendering with dynamic lights and shadows, physics, you can have vehicles. So if you build a downtown prototype in SU, you could import that to a game editor, and then load it into the game and play it online, live, with friends. If you throw some cars in to your city map, you could all hop in cars and drive around and see your city by walking or by driving, or by flying over if you have planes, etc.

So all this talk about FarCry, FarCry 2, Crysis, Sandbox, Source, etc is all just different games or their editors. Source is the name of the game engine (physics + 3d geometry handler + renderer), and the game editor for the Source Engine is Hammer (I think?).

This thread was started about the plugin which works with the Source engine. So all you need to do is go buy a game that is powered by Source - Half Life 2, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and you get the game editor Hammer included. Then install the SU plugin and you would be able to make a model of something, like a building in SU, and take it in to the game through the Hammer map editor.

Anyhow, I'm sure I overlooked important things, included useless information, and got most of my facts and names wrong. But hey, it wouldn't be a "Chris Fullmer" post any other way!

Chris

plot-paris

really a nice summary of why game engines and their editors are so great for use as an achitectural visualisation tool. thank you very much, Chris.

@zapwizard
very impressive model. you got the terrain from google earth, right? did you save it as SketchUp model and then convert it with XSI for import into Sandbox2? is it really as simple as that?

where did you get the superb satelite images from?

damn, I am afraid I have to download the Crysis demo tonight!

zapwizard

Richard, that screenshot is in-game. Crysis handles large areas, real-world scale and lighting very well that is why it is so attractive for visualization. The vegetation handling is also second to none. (So far)

Also the editor for SandBox2 is done in-game, meaning fully rendered, and it takes only a keypress to move into the map in a interactive form. Many other editors are just that: separate editors that allows you to make a map, compile it, and then launch it separately in the game.

I have only dabbled a little bit in the Source editor. It is easy to use also but not quite as powerful if you want something that is a perfect real-world match, and it also doesn't do massively large maps. In 64-bit mode SandBox2 map size is only limited by your CPU horsepower and memory.

@plot-paris, See below on the terrain, none of the actual in-game models other then the HDTV and flashlight posted above are imported SketchUp. However I used SketchUp and Google Earth in making my map. And I plan on using SketchUp to make in-game models once I get a good importer flow working.

For my first map (Castaway) I extracted satellite photos in 1:1 scale from google earth.
I have a series of video tutorials on how to do this here:
http://www.veoh.com/channels/ZapWizard
But the heightmap (the elevation of the terrain) was all done by hand, and all the terrain was re-painted in-game using the satellite photos as reference.
Here is my flickr photos on that project:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zapwizard/sets/72157603074021169/

For my second map (Zion) it was a bit easier. Since the area is located in the US and is a national park there is hundreds of pages of data on the USGS website. Specifically I used a 1 meter resolution satellite photo (USGS) of the area which was better quality then Google earth had on the area.
Then I downloaded a 2-meter resolution height map from the USGS website.
Just with those two components I was able to get the images above.
The how-to on importing real-world height maps is here:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=17539

Once you add water, roads, and vegetation the results are very close to photo-real: