Sketchup and Blender

solo

I can recommend Lynda.com as the ONLY tutorial so far that kept me interested and on a path to learn Blender, I cannot say if it's because of the quality and good skills of teacher or the fact that I was paying and thus was forced to get money's worth.

http://www.lynda.com/Blender-training-tutorials/164-0.html

Once that is done then there are many awesome sites with more advanced tutorials, the most important is knowing where everything is, here is a pdf cheat with all the shortcut keys from BlenderGuru.

Blender_Cheat_Sheet.pdf

Rich O Brien

Alt+J to turn tris to quads

cotty

I've watched only some of them, but they were great...
Youtube playlist from Andrew Price

Rich O Brien

Just a query as to why you say the above is unusable?

dedmin

Baby steps - don't have much time to learn.
Some tips for Sketchupers:

in SketchUp we select with a left mouse button, but in Blender by default it is the right button - so, change it here:
zoom to mouse position:

-Blender doesn't warn you to save the file when quitting, so check this:

And to unify SketchUp and Blender navigation adjust SketchUp's keystrokes the same as in Blender.

solo

Those are good tips, first thing I did was switch to left button, the zoom to mouse point was brilliant, gives an SU feel to orbit in Blender.

dedmin

for heavy files try this setting:
to have ortho when switching top/bottom/left/right/front/back check this:

jaxcoffee

I decided to go the SolidWorks direction instead of Blender. If I'm going to learn something more complex than SketchUp, I'm going to learn an industry standard. At least that is my reasoning. Your milage may vary. Would love to see this kind of thread for SolidWorks. Anyway, carry on. This is a good thing for Blender folks.

dedmin

We love plugins and scripts - here is the Blender's place to search for treasures:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions;2.6/Py/Scripts

And Blender comes with some that are not enabled by default:

This is from here - http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?316335-2-69-released

@unknownuser said:

For those interested and that do not use regularly update builds (buildbot/graphicall), the official releases do not include the addons_contrib folder that contain many addons that some may find usefull.
I have uploaded the recent one i had from r61020 (from the buildbot) on that dropbox link - https://www.dropbox.com/s/0eert8068okz3ag/addons_contrib269.rar?m

To install, just take the "addons_contrib" directory from the downloaded addons_contrib269.rar and move it to
\yourblender269directory\2.69\scripts
So you obtain
\yourblender269directory\2.69\scripts\addons_contr ib\

Once done, when launching Blender and going to File -> User Preferences -> Addons, you'll see them if you enable the "Testing" button
(additionally you'll have more themes)

Note : the addon contrib does not include every user made addons available for Blender, you'll have to remember there are several of them that are not in it but that you can still find in the Addon&Release board :
http://blenderartists.org/forum/foru...pts-and-Themes

solo

@jaxcoffee said:

I decided to go the SolidWorks direction instead of Blender. If I'm going to learn something more complex than SketchUp, I'm going to learn an industry standard. At least that is my reasoning. Your milage may vary. Would love to see this kind of thread for SolidWorks. Anyway, carry on. This is a good thing for Blender folks.

I looked at SolidWorks, it is an awesome bit of software, especially for engineering and I guess if you intend 3D printing.

Rich O Brien

@Pete

Can the Thea logo be shared?

Why is the tris a problem?

What is it you want exactly to do with the mesh?

solo

@rich o brien said:

@Pete

Can the Thea logo be shared?

Why is the tris a problem?

What is it you want exactly to do with the mesh?

Yes, here it is:

AutoSave_thea logo.skp

I want to follow a Blender tutorial and finally render it with Thea4Blender, but I cannot get a smooth mesh in Blender in order to render and put materials on that I need.

Rich O Brien

Are you setting the shading to smooth in the toolshelf?

Whilst in object mode press T to show/hide toolshelf. Select the object and choose smooth for the shading

solo

@rich o brien said:

Are you setting the shading to smooth in the toolshelf?

Whilst in object mode press T to show/hide toolshelf. Select the object and choose smooth for the shading

I tried that originally but looks ugly.

logo smooth.jpg

Rich O Brien

Add an edge split modifier

Rich O Brien

i'll rework the mesh for you.

but please get out of the habit of n-gons in su....

if you don't put that shit to bed then you'll never progress

solo

@rich o brien said:

i'll rework the mesh for you.

but please get out of the habit of n-gons in su....

if you don't put that shit to bed then you'll never progress

Sketchup is pretty much ngons and tri's, I guess what you are saying is I need to model in Blender instead right?

Rich O Brien

Not really....

You need to think the same for both. It is about good topology.

I do think you would benefit more in trying to model this in Blender then asking when you hit problems.

I pretty much guarantee that how you model it in Blender will transition to SU. Proper topology means easier UV mapping.

So either model it in SU with topology in mind or vice versa.

solo

Can you show me how to model it in SU so that it translates better in Blender?

Stinkie

Couldn't you bevel the n-gons in slightly in Blender to get rid of the smoothing issues?