do any exist?

It's as the title asks, is there a 3D modeling program out there capable of reading Sketchup files? I can use the method mentioned in this post, but I'm hoping to find a simpler method.

I tried searching on my own, but only found download sites for Sketchup itself. <_< Has anyone heard of a program that can do this?

Nothing free, if that's what you're looking for.

Do what I did and find someone with a registered copy to export your model to .3ds or .obj

The converted model might start out very very small. You'll have to scale it up in order for it to work right.

Send it to me and I could send it to my people, etc etc...

You sure your friend won't mind, Insomniac? I don't want to ask too much of them.

We look out for our own kind you know.

Besides I want to see your badass ships in 3d too.

Nice ships you got there

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5ZH7HN06
see if any of those formats work with blender

Wow, thanks! I appreciate you and your friend doing this for me. Unfortunately, none of those formats seem readable by Blender. I just looked through everything I have here on Blender but I can't find a list of formats it can read or anything similar.

look under file>import. those are all the formats blender can open, and in order to use something of that format, select the format you want to use (.obj is the most common) and select it, then navigate to the file you want to open.

hope that helps you

This post has been edited by yamfries : 03 June 2010 - 07:33 AM

Sketchup's export files from Sketchup 6 on exports to a .kmz file, which is actually a zip archive. Rename the file extension to .zip, then extract. Under the models folder, you'll see a .dae file, which is importable into Blender as a Collada 1.4 file.

Blender's internal modeller is fairly easy to use as well, so it makes things a little easier to create everything right in Blender, rather than deal with the hassle of trying to import/export models around. The other thing that export/import does is creates triangulated models instead of quadrilaterals. Of course, it would be great if Blender could deal with n-gons, but rumor has it that some sort of n-gon support is coming with Blender 2.5. I believe that Blender does have a script to convert triangle faces to quad faces, and vice versa, but I am not 100% positive on that.

This post has been edited by krugeruwsp : 03 June 2010 - 11:12 AM

QUOTE (yamfries @ Jun 3 2010, 05:25 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

look under file>import. those are all the formats blender can open, and in order to use something of that format, select the format you want to use (.obj is the most common) and select it, then navigate to the file you want to open.

hope that helps you

This does help. Now I know I actually can use the formats Insomniac provided since Blender apparently can read .obj files. I'm still new to this, so I didn't fully understand what I had to do to load a file into Blender. I wasn't aware I had to import rather than simply open.

QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ Jun 3 2010, 07:48 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sketchup's export files from Sketchup 6 on exports to a .kmz file, which is actually a zip archive. Rename the file extension to .zip, then extract. Under the models folder, you'll see a .dae file, which is importable into Blender as a Collada 1.4 file.

Blender's internal modeller is fairly easy to use as well, so it makes things a little easier to create everything right in Blender, rather than deal with the hassle of trying to import/export models around. The other thing that export/import does is creates triangulated models instead of quadrilaterals. Of course, it would be great if Blender could deal with n-gons, but rumor has it that some sort of n-gon support is coming with Blender 2.5. I believe that Blender does have a script to convert triangle faces to quad faces, and vice versa, but I am not 100% positive on that.

Are saying that, using this method, I can get my models from Sketchup 7 (the free one) straight into Blender without needing someone else to convert or needing to buy Sketchup Pro?

** Edit:** Just read your post in Delphi's thread confirming this, krug. Thanks for the info!

This post has been edited by DarthKev : 03 June 2010 - 06:18 PM

Exactly. And no prob.

well, at least someone is smarter than me.

I can't take too much credit for it. I ran across a blog post about it give or take a year back and wrote down the info figuring it would come in handy.

You still took the initiative to write it down and share it, though. Don't short change yourself, it's not healthy.

Some snazzy ships there, they look like they're going to be boasting proprietary weapons. And they look like they were inspired by computer connectors (like Mini and Micro USB, etc etc).

Thanks, I've got others, too, and even more on the way. There's a fighter, a line of ships inspired by the Kestrel, even a freighter. I've got two more fighters I need to design before building, and I'll probably make more just for fun.

Though I can't take full credit. They're all made from the pieces Delphi provided.

This post has been edited by DarthKev : 04 June 2010 - 05:36 PM

krug, I think I did something wrong. I was trying to import this:

What I got was this:

It looks like most of the pieces are there (I don't see the wings at all) but they're all jumbled up. Also, whenever I use Blender, it lags A LOT and is almost unusable. The version I have is 2.49b, do I need to update it or something? One last question regarding Blender: what does the 'blenderplayer' do? It came with the copy of Blender I downloaded, though whenever I try running it, it begins to start and then stops without even an error message. Its icon doesn't even appear in the dock.

Should point out that even google Sketchup Free can export .dae files, no need to fuss around.

I just did it then~

You've got the correct version of Python installed, right? Looks to me like a scripting error. Not sure on the blenderplayer, I've never used it.

Python? The only thing I have concerning Python is a software agreement text document. I wasn't aware I need to download and install something else in order to properly use Blender. There wasn't anything like that in the installation instructions. In fact, there weren't even any installation instructions to begin with.

I'm beginning to think I got a defunct copy of Blender. <_<