Sketchup to Blender

Hello, I'm new to Unity and game developing, I'm currently working in a personal and educational project.

I am trying to figure out an efficient way to model my characters and animate them afterwards. My design area is architecture, so the most flexible tool I have knowledge in is Sketchup.

The process I'm using right now is as follows:

1. I hand-draw the character I want to animate, and simplify its geometry to polygons in front, side and rear view.
2. Then I import this diagram into Sketchup and redraw every polygon and start sculping the character's body based on each view. I keep every limb separated by making them into components (Head, arms, shoulders, etc.), so the geometry won't get mixed up.

I wonder if it is possible to export this model I have right now into Blender or another platform so I can polish it a bit more, and animate it, but I'm not sure if it will conserve the geometry separated in components as I did in Sketchup before.

I've heard Blender is much more specialized into character design and animation, and also has the option to put hair and soften edges.

An initial idea for modeling it in Sketchup was to use simple shapes and make the model have more quality through textures (like in PSX games), so they had a low polygon count. Although, I'm not sure if softening edges in Blender affects the polygon count a lot (Subdivide or Soften Edges?).

Thanks in advance for your attention and advice. I'll try to update my advance in this so it can help others who are in the same learning process I am in.

 

Hey there!

I'm also fairly new to game design and coding, but I have got this one figured out.

The SketchUp warehouse has some amazing architectural models and steampunk style stuff I was dying to implement so I spent like 4 hours converting files lol.

You have to have the full version of sketchup. I just used a trial version and did it all at once so I didn't have to buy it yet.

Open the file.
Export it to an FBX, but in a new isolated folder so Unity can more easily find it's textures later.

Open unity.
Drag the new FOLDER into your project hierarchy - not just the exported FBX.

Drop the new object into your scene and see if it is textured. Half the time it won't be.

If it's grey and depressing, then click the fbx file and go to it's import settings.

Select Model
Scroll down to Materials
Make sure "Import Materials" is checked.
Set Material Naming: Models Name + Models Material
Set Material Search: Recursive Up.

Apply import settings.

Should work fine at that point.

I noticed I would still have to apply a few textures here and there manually, and that to get a nice look like in sketchup I had to re apply reflective/diffuse/etc options to make it "pop" again. But it works. And it's beautiful.

Cheers!

-Rob

 

Oh, also if you wanted to pop it into Blender for rigging, use the DAE export to blender, then FBX out of it. I noticed when I used fbx into blender the mesh shapes were all kind of off by like a meter. Mecanim should be able to handle any basic humanoid mesh provided it's at the proper scale. Rigify legacy animations can handle anything mecanim can't.