Posts made by oceanembers

There are several plugins that could help you. fredo's bezier spline and thomthom's bezier surface spring to mind, and will give you the functions you need in this instance.
Unfortunately, Sketchup does not have any native support for curves, so there won't be a way to bring in the models and keep 100% of the editability they had in revit.

I remember spending a lot of time trying to make Star Wars ships when I was about 14, and sketchup was still just a hobby... I distinctly remember trying my hand at a light freighter from the extended universe. I was parsecs away from these, and I doubt I could make something this good even now, but who knows, maybe you'll inspire me to have another go

It's important to remember that sketchup was never made with game engines in mind. Other programs may offer support for atlasing - from a quick google search, blender has a plugin that will do it http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?303137-Multiple-UV-mapped-models-gt-single-UV-map-texture-atlas

I have worked around this issue before by manually atlassing textures, then UV mapping with some help from various plugins http://sketchucation.com/pluginstore?listtype=1%26amp;author=0%26amp;category=0%26amp;search=uv%26amp;submit=%3F

On another note, I would not recommend sketchup for game-ready modelling, and certainly not for UV-mapping, texturing, etc. Others will disagree, but personally, I use autodesk maya for this sort of project. Still, to each their own.

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Oh of course, quads are incredibly important if you're modelling something that will be edited later in something like max, maya, blender, etc. as well as for deformation, but I got the impression that Braikenridge just wanted to go from sketchup directly into a real-time renderer, not build something to be passed around a game development studio.

70-80MB is a pretty huge model. Take a look at CleanUp³ http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=193587#p193587 , you should be able to reduce those model sizes dramatically.

window -> preferences -> shortcuts will allow you to export your shortcuts to a file

If you use the sketchucation plugin store, you can go to settings (the little gears) -> bundles and then autoinstall all extensions for the bundle corresponding to your old system.

If you don't use the sketchucation plugin store, or have some extensions that aren't on there, you can copy them from wherever they're stored on your system - it'll either be C:\Users(your user)\appdata\Sketchup\Sketchup 2015\plugins, or C:\ProgramData\Sketchup\Sketchup 2015\plugins

Kristoff, I believe that quads are only really necessary for things that will undergo deformation - people and animals, for instance. Otherwise, the only reason you'd need them would be to make the models friendlier to anybody who edits them in a subdiv modeller like maya.

The simplest answer is that you can use the same models for both, although that isn't necessarily optimal.

"Game Ready" basically just means optimised for a real-time engine (games or real time renderers) - the best practises for this (in short, since there are many different things) are

1. Reasonably low poly - This doesn't mean that you need everything looking blocky and angular, but it does mean that you should be avoiding things like twelve-section arcs for miniscule details. Keep in mind that the actual count that matters is the triangle count - a polygon with 20 sides has about 4x as many triangles than a polygon with 4 sides.

2. Normals facing outwards - Your front faces should be the visible ones. A lot of engines do not render reverse faces by default.

3. As few unique textures as possible - This one isn't actually very viable in sketchup, due to it's lack of UV editing tools, but does speed up performance and should be kept in mind nonetheless.

I believe SU 2015 fixes this - at least for windows 64 bit

Assuming you aren't looking for joints etc., it's a pretty simple dynamic to make. You'd probably do better with some of the plugins mentioned above, but here, I attached one for you. Pretty basic - use the options to change height, width, flange/web thickness. Scale tool changes the length.

I-Beam_DYN.skp

I often find that it helps to disable "super rounding at corners" and enable "respect strict offset as far as possible" in the grey settings bar at the top of your viewport when using roundcorner

Your beam does not need to be so poly-heavy! You can achieve details like that in a render using a mix of normal/bump and displacement maps, with only enough geometry detail to define the silhouette. It doesn't matter so much for this model, maybe, but if you created an entire scene like this, I'd not be surprised if your computer gave up the ghost.

Just a thought, but do you have any abnormally large textures that could be causing issues?
Otherwise, I'd say delete things until the weirdness stops (in a backup obviously), add things back in until it starts, and try to diagnose it that way.
As for why it's fine in a new model, I'd say perhaps the issue is within a group/component and doesn't kick off until it's accessed?

I don't know off the top of my head, but I suspect that you are right. Take a look at thomthom's component replacer plugin if you have to replace many instances, or just copy the new geometry into an existing component. Both less than ideal solutions, I know, but workable.

Does anybody know how to re-export a sketchup model into a lumenRT scene after the initial export? I can't imagine it's difficult, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.

Edit: Turns out I was having difficulty due to a bug on e-on's side. You're supposed to be able to click export and have it update properly, but it wasn't happening. It should be fixed now.

It could be that you're using perspective and exporting as 2D graphic. Try exporting as a 3D model DWG, or using parallel projection (under camera) before exporting as a 2D graphic

There are some tutorials on API usage, under "introduction" on http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/ . The specific tutorial you're looking for is http://www.sketchup.com/intl/en/developer/docs/tutorial_geometry

@mike lucey said:

On the other hand, I'm currently using a Wireless Scope Node

This looks like it would be a comfortable fit for me (I tend to favour a fingertip grip), but I can't stand wireless mice x_x - I navigate pretty erratically in most 3D environments, once I've got a handle on the camera controls, not to mention some of the games I spend too much time playing, so I really feel the latency of a wireless connection.

My current mouse is actually a 7-button Roccat Kova[+]. The buttons by my thumb aren't resistive enough, so I click them by accident and therefore can't map them to anything meaningful, and the buttons by my little finger are too resistive for reliable use by that awkward lil digit. So essentially, it's just a really flashy three button mouse with nice DPI - I wouldn't reccomend it, I'd say go instead for something with less buttons and more usability.

I'm not sure why this is happening then, actually. I downloaded the model to check it out - If you repaint all the geometry with a single texture, it does fix it, implying that the problem is sketchup seeing multiple textures on the model, but it's quite clear that there is only one. The only possible reason I can see for this is that you might have moved the texture positions on the faces, but that should only affect the UV coordinates in the export anyway.

If I get rid of the other unused textures, and check Sketchup.active_model.materials.length in the ruby console, it returns 1. One material.

In short, the fix works, but I have no idea why. I suspect it's just the fbx export feature sucking, but I'd be interested to see if anybody else can shed some light here?