SU to blender (+ small tutorial)

massimo

Nice one . I like your desaturated colours.

michaliszissiou

Thanks, its just a test anyway.
SU model exported via SUpro obj exporter (collada blender importer leads to a complete useless mess). I had first to 'explode' components and turn them to groups. I had to check that faces look outside (white color, not blue). After imported to blender, had to select all vertices and remove some doubles. Triangles to quads (this makes UV unwrap and displacements simpler). All these were one click operations. Now I was ready to texture and render in blender. Some more tips. When building windows in SU, its better to avoid all this push-pull, just do the openings and keep the rest stuff as a separate group, makes texturing easier, produces better topology too.
To render in blender means a lot of clicks, lots of material properties, lot of experimentation. What do you expect? Its an advanced renderer. (more than kerkythea). If asking for a friendlier renderer then... well, podium is my favorite.

EarthMover

@michaliszissiou said:

If asking for a friendlier renderer then... well, podium is my favorite.

I'm surprised that's not their slogan.
Podium - The Friendlier Renderer.

Seriously, thank you Michalis for your contributions and ideas. I have 3ds Max and Modo, but have been slowly exploring Blender. I'd love to get away from the upgrade money pit that is most paid apps these days.

sepo

Haha....The Friendlier Renderer....we might adopt it.

It seems I will have to start exploring this Blender as well.

Fletch

@michaliszissiou said:

rendered in blender v2.5 internal renderer (~1 min).

lovely! beautiful light and shadow!

michaliszissiou, what resolution was this rendering? what machine/processors/processor speed?

michaliszissiou

@fletch said:

what resolution was this rendering? what machine/processors/processor speed?

Thanks Adam, Sid, Fletch. Rendered at 1680x1060, blender v2.5 64bit on a mac (two xeon-nehalem, quad cores 16 threads at 2.26 Ghz). But could take 5 or 10 or 20 min, so many variations. I could say that ~1min on v2.5 or ~5min on v2.49b. What made this fast is that avoided radiosity solution using just a sun and three emitters. Blender aims at animation, so its fast.

pilou

Cool quiet images

The collada exporter from SU free seems don't work with the Blender Collada Importer
But seems work when you export from SU free in KMZ (rename in .Zip, unzip = DAE) then import in Blender

michaliszissiou

@unknownuser said:

The collada exporter from SU free seems don't work with the Blender Collada Importer
But seems work when you export from SU in KMZ (rename in .Zip, unzip = DAE) then import in Blender

Thanks Pilou, but DAE in KMZ is identical to DAE export. A mess. Practically useless!! Its collada blender importer or a SU problem, or I'm doing something wrong.

pilou

@unknownuser said:

Its collada blender importer or a SU problem

Probably both, but it's the only thing that I can do now from the free Su for export an object directly inside the Blender 2.5 Alpha 0

EscapeArtist

@michaliszissiou said:

Thanks Pilou, but DAE in KMZ is identical to DAE export. A mess. Practically useless!! Its collada blender importer or a SU problem, or I'm doing something wrong.

I'll second that SU DAE to Blender Collada import stinks, I exported a building and it's gigantic mess of triangulated faces and half reversed normals. On any serious model you'll spend longer fixing normals and cleaning up faces than you ever did modeling it.

michaliszissiou

"exported a building and it's gigantic mess of triangulated faces and half reversed normals"

Exactly so. Maybe we should forget texturing in SU. Anyway UV texturing is superb in blender. Maybe this 'importing SU models to blender' operation is a waste of time. Maybe...

Camara

Hi,
It's nice to see another user of a SU/Blender workflow. I love the two programs and they make my life more easy.
SU is great for modeling architecture but Blender as more advance tools for modeling organic forms,texturing and render.
My workflow is:
I use SU free for modeling from the CAD files and do texturing, then use the Kerkythea exporter, then I have a Kerkythea XML file and the textures folder.
Then use the wonderful Nicetuna converter from the Kerkythea format into OBJ, it can be found here: http://www.nicetuna.com/kt2obj
Then import into Blender the OBJ file,be sure that the file are in the same folder that the textures and in the import options check the image search for Blender find them, and separate OBJ by Object/Group/Material. And Voilá.
The import is perfect.
In Blender you just need to delete duplicate vertices and transform tri faces into quads,that are very simple commands.

Then one can export back to Kerky for render or use another render engine available for Blender like Yafaray, Luxrender or VRay.
This is how I do it. Hope someone finds this information useful.

EarthMover

Thanks Camara. Interesting workflow. I am going to give that a shot.

EDIT - Gave it a shot and it works great in 2.49. I can't seem to import .obj into 2.5 alpha. Anyone else have this problem? BTW - the KT .xml to .obl workflow also works great for going from SU to Modo.

david57

pilou

@unknownuser said:

I can't seem to import .obj into 2.5

OBJ importer of the 2.5 Alpha 0 is bugged!
With some people that works 1/2, for other = 0

@unknownuser said:

I use SU free for modeling from the CAD files and do texturing, then use the Kerkythea exporter, then I have a Kerkythea XML file and the textures folder.

Ok cool trick but it's not a direct workflow SU free to Blender (that was my problematic for the moment)
(during the bugging time time of the Alpha 0)

michaliszissiou

OK, blender 2.5 is Alpha 0, lets work with v2.49b. Lets keep v2.5 for rendering.
Its a small tutorial here. Exporting from SUpro as .obj. Exporting textures too. When impoted to blender check for doubles. I didn't find any though. If models are already textured in SU, DO NOT convert triangles to quads, UV problem. You can edit UV textures however, you can even have texture painting, projected textures etc. Everything works just fine, just don't subdivide geometry (bad triangulated SU models here).
Here's an old SU model:

As you may noticed I'm checking faces so to look outside, that's really important. No blue faces, ok
Picture 1.jpg

So in SUpro, export .obj like this:
Picture 2.jpg

Importing .obj in blender 2.49b like this.
Picture 3.jpg

Here's the model in blender. You can see on the right, all textures UVs etc have imported beautifully.
I deleted cactus and added some blender trees BTW. Everything works like a charm
Picture 4.jpg

A quick render ~2 min

pilou

Very cool tut and neat result!
Can I translate your tut in French?

michaliszissiou

My pleasure Pilou.

pilou

Thx!

Done!

EarthMover

@michaliszissiou said:

OK, blender 2.5 is Alpha 0, lets work with v2.49b. Lets keep v2.5 for rendering.

Michalis, does this mean that you will import into 2.49 first, then save as .blend file and open it in 2.5 for rendering? Just trying to understand the workflow. I can't wait until they are finished with 2.5. It is a real gem in the making...especially if it is still free!!

Also where do you get your Blender trees?