Google's Sketchup for prefabs?

I wanted to play around with a 3d app on my new iMac and only thing I have is a older version of 3d max for my PC. I figured I'd give Google's Sketchup a spin because I've never touched it.

I will say, I'm pretty amazed at how easy it is and it really brings 3D to the masses. It's just great for doing buildings and basic structures that could be used as prefabs in Unity games.

I did a little research and it seems if you buy the pro version, you can import models made in skecthup to both 3dmax and Maya.. possibly other 3d apps but those are the only one's I've tried.

So I'm wondering if anyone has actually used sketchup to build prefabs for a unity project? If so how did it work out?

Granted I have no clue how it is on polygon useage, but seems it could be a very quick way to build simple game objects. Seems it could be a awesome tool for people using unity to build virtual walk troughs of buildings and so on.


If you have no clue what I'm talking about check it out it has a free version and it's pretty fun to play around with.


http://sketchup.google.com

There is a whole library of user generated models that can be downloaded and some are pretty good and shows what can be done.. Find them here http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/

 

I use Sketchup all day every day for work. The models are usually exported over to Max for rendering, but I have done some stuff with Unity. Polygon usage should be just fine as long as you stay away from the Follow-me tool, which can spit out tons of geometry without you noticing.

 

I migrated from Sketchup Pro to Cheetah recently. I still prefer its interface, but Sketchup's models have some issues with their exported formats. I couldn't get any of my models in Sketchup to work as Trees for Unity's terrain engine, for example, and I never could figure out why. Nevertheless for producing architectural geometry, it still is the fastest I've used, and I think that is worth a few headaches with exports.

Advice: Make sure that you are using the Pro version. It is the only one with the capacity to export in FBX and 3ds. The free version requires a work around with Blender as middle-ware.

If you are interested: Cheetah has worked very well with but a couple minor glitches with importing animations into Unity.

 

Yea I looked at a few trees in Sketchup and noticed they don't seem to be the standard billboard tree design which is likely the problem with importing them.

I of course haven't tried yet, but seems like it should be able to build basic geometry. Looks like they offer a 8 hour demo of the pro version.

he he I have a PC and a iMac so that gives me 16 hours to experiment. :twisted:

It just seems so fast and easy to build geometry it would be nice to have just a simple app like that to do basic stuff with for prefab work. Just depends how much time is involved on the prepping once a model is imported to max or maya.

 

I wasn't using Sketchup's trees. I made a few of my own and they didn't work at all in the terrain engine. They were built the same way as the island demo's trees. Very weird.

Anyhow, I made several environments for use in Unity projects completely with Sketchup. It worked ok. Here's an example of something I made a year ago:

http://www.rawbw.com/~theparrs/unity/PaleTower.html

 

Just get the free one. To go from SketchUp to Unity, just follow my directions. If you want, you can use Blender as an intermediary, but this works too.

Step one. Open the file in SketchUp
Step two. Go to File>Export>3D Model Choose Google earth 4
Step three. Once the file is successfully exported, find it on your computer, and rename it archivo.zip.
Step four. Open the file. Archivo.zip/Models/(whatever the name of the Gogle Earth file).dae the .dae is Collada.
Now that you have a collada file, you can clean it up in Blender (easy to get the collada into it Just make a Scripts window, go to the popup menu, choose Import, Collada 1.4(.dae) choose the file, and you're ready for tweaking [the larger the file, the longer the Import, so be patient]), or just go straight to Unity with it.

Good Luck!

 

I am trying to use the system suggested by Dakta but to no avail. Unity won't import the .dae file (just gives "couldn't import file" warning) and when I import it into Blender and save it as a .blend file the import goes fine and I can edit it, but when I reopen the file the mesh is gone leaving me with an empty file.
Any ideas what's going wrong?

 

There is an obj exporter around that works with the free version of Skup. Google away....

AC

 

I have a friend who has issues with my system as well. I haven't figured it out yet, but I hope I can. His import all weird, with meshes missing. For SketchUp imports, make sure there are no groups or components, or any face-me models (some trees, and bryce. If it's 2d and always faces the camera, remove it.). Sorry guys. I have no clue. I just happen to have a mac Mini, Intel core duo, newest sketchup, newest blender. it works fine for me. I have found that all models from sketchup once in blender can be scaled to "0.083333333" to be a reasonable size. it also makes one foot one blender Unit.

 

Unity needs trees to be either 2d images, or 3d with some simple armature.

 

Thanks for this answer and I was able to find my answer to my question on how to import Sketchup models into Unity by just searching "sketchup" in the forum search tool.