Has anyone else gone to get something from the 3d warehouse to find that the model you want is only available as a KMZ or Collada file, neither of which are usable in sketchup 7 ?

I was able to convert the model using blender, into 3DS then import it into sketchup but... Why do I have to do this when I am downloading from sketchup's 3d warehouse.

Did I miss something, Is there an easier way that I am just to stunned to figure out.

Thanks for any help.

Absolutely amazing work and thanks for the list of useful addons and pics of the process. Really helps out noobs like me. As for other programs, blender comes in at the right price for learning with and is very powerful but I have learned faster and actually made something useful in sketchup in no time. The learning curve for all of the other software I have tried is really steep.

Just a short note on processors and GPU's. Because SketchUp is not multi core aware but it is clock dependant, an inexpensive but high clock dual core CPU will actually give you faster results than a slower quad core cpu. I recommend a dual core so that the OS and other apps such as virus scans etc can run on the first core leaving you with an empty core for sketchup. This only applies to sketchup though, as soon as you use a good renderer like Indigo the quad core even with slightly slower clocks per core will vastly outrun the dual core. as for the graphics, I would look into linux game benchmarks to find out about OpenGL performance as this is the main api used by linux. oddly on an old ati rage 128 that I have in an old laptop, sketchup is actually usable under linux and wine but totally useless under win2k. That being said for a budget minded system for sketchup I would buy a fast AMD dual core cpu like an 5600X2 and the best video card I could afford (check out tomshardware vga lists for the current month and buy something recommended between $125 and $200) 4GB of ram and a fast HD. All of this should set you back between $450 and $600 (less in the US). for rendering you need something bigger or you could use a commercial render farm like ranch computing and save yourself a crapload of money while getting awesome performance (renders for as little as $10) I run a system similar to this and upgrade just behind the curve for cheap every 2 years. And I can make my own renders but would love to have a few quad cores sitting around to make into render pigs, running linux of course. Just my thoughts on the best bang for my limited pc bucks.