SketchUp game exporter (Source)
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@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=19058I have a (Very) basic how-to here:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?postid=178946#post178946Wow 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!
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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
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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!
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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=17539Once you add water, roads, and vegetation the results are very close to photo-real:
Compare to: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3932425
My flickr set for this project is here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zapwizard/sets/72157605714135417/ -
Sigh...something else I have to learn how to use now.
Amazing, zap!
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@lewiswadsworth said:
Sigh...something else I have to learn how to use now.
Amazing, zap!
My thoughts exactly Lewis. I'm really hoping a proper SU->SB exporter could be devised though.
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zapwizard, thank you very much for your posts - they contain some truely exciting information. you made me really curious (my laptop at home is downloading the crysis demo as we speak
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This is very interesting and has great possibilities for real-time
presentation.I have located this tut for CryEngine2 Sandbox2 Basic Tutorial as
I did not a clue about how to approach these apps .... Errrrr, not
that I will be much wiser after reading the tut .... but I live in
hopehttp://konakona.nbtxathcx.net/sb2/
Mike
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Links to tutorials on SandBox2:
http://doc.crymod.com -Official manual
http://wiki.crymod.com -Wiki
http://www.crymod.com/tutorials.php -User made tutorials (all of my tutorials are in here)There are also lots of other third-party sites like the one mike posted.
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My former colleague has experimented with using the Crisis Sandbox and importing skp. He was inspired by the digital urban blog demonstration too. I don't know how much time he spent on it but he was underwhelmed with the results. I can't remember many details but I think there are certain on-screen windows and buttons (part of the game) that he could not figure out how to hide.
If you search on Digtal urban for Oblivion (another game) the potential for utilising that looks better.
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Wow I downloaded the Cry2 trailer!!! Man if that is the realtime render environment that can be expected viewing a SU scene who needs a renderer!
So has anyone been playing with walk throughs with the cry sandbox editor. BTW can the camera motion be set and how does one produce an animation? Via screen capture?
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I bought Crysis 4 months ago with the purpose to use the sandbox editor and try some Archviz with it. (the XSI mod tool as in between app).
To be honest, the workflow was way too tedious and I soon gave it up.
It would have been a different story if one could export straight from SU to the sandbox editor with all mats in place.Oh, and another thing: you can't use the output you get from Crytek engine commercially without license, meaning you need to keep your archviz in house or just provide it as free documentation to a client.
A license costs tens of thousands of dollars/euros. -
Wow thats a disappointment! really!
I had high hopes that this would be a fast animation opportunity! Would be interesting though to read the license. It could be more in reference to charging for play??
Yes the direct export from SU would be welcomed! Though unless you can use it for commercial purposes then little to be gained!!!
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Update for you guys: There is now a much easier and faster way to import SketchUp models into SandBox2 (Crysis engine)
The program is a basically a Calloda to CryEngine2 converter.
See my thread here:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?postid=394096#post394096Source model:
http://tinyurl.com/5gjd42
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Thats pretty sweet. I might have to rope my friend in to testing a few models out for me.
Cheers for developing this
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I guess this means I'll have to buy both Crysis and Crysis Warhead now. Awesome excuse!
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Just a reminder: If you want to try this out without buying, the Crysis demo comes with the full editor. (But not as many 3D assets as the full game)
The editor is not updated for Crysis warhead, although it is apparently coming sometime.
However you can import most of the Crysis warhead assets into the current editor.The biggest thing I am going to be using SketchUp for is buildings and props, which is a huge part of any game.
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Now to get whatever one may have compiled in Sandbox2 back out and into SU. I suppose that poses as many issues as using the Sandbox2 tool with (or without) custom built models for commercial purposes.
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Just some basic question.
I tried exporting a house and all I got was a yellow ball.
What am I doing wrong?
Do I need to explode every thing or turn it into a components or... -
I have exported items with multiple components with no issue. Some more complex models I exploded and then cleaned up. Make sure and purge any unused items before export.
A messy model that uses lots of intersecting hidden lines may not work well.Ideally a game ready model should be a solid model with no hidden lines, no lines that pass through faces. Basically the same tips that Google shows in their "How to model for Google Earth" tutorials. All texture dimensions need to be a multiple of 64 along their dimensions (128x128, 256x512, etc...)
Crysis uses .DDS (direct draw) textures, so I convert all the textures using Paint.net.
When you first import the object it won't have any textures.
In SandBox2 open the Material Editor, select "get current material"
You will see a list of material id's, inside there will be a texture path.
The texture path will end up looking like "file://..images/texture0.jpg"
Change that to the correct path for the .dds replacement.
For portability to other people's computers, you should keep your textures and model files under either "crysis\game\levels\YOU LEVEL\objects" or in a similar \Mod directory.I suggest you try exporting the spitfire linked in my thread first to get the hang of it.
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