Using Google sketch up for Mesh.

[VesperiaStarfall]

Hey everyone. I was wondering If I could import my sketch up creations to secondlife, such as buildings and furniture.  Is it possible to import my creations to blender, edit them there, and upload them inworld?

[Niall Braveheart]

You can export dae files form sketchup and load them directly into SL.

Alternatively the pro vesrion of Sketchup had an obj exporter,or there is a third party extension that works with the standard version that will export to obj.

You can then import the obj files into blender and refind the mesh if necessary and export the dae files form there.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

Generally, the geometry of sketchup models is not suitable for use in SL. They tend to be fragmented into large numbers of small meshes, often with inefficient triangulation, excessive numbers of materials and poor UV mapping that has to be redone when the meshes are joined. A great deal of editing in Blender would be usually be required to make good models optimised for SL. If you know sketchup but not Blender, working on your sketchuip models in Blender could be a way to learn Blender. That way you will soon get to the point where you can more easily just use your sketchup models as a template, then build from scratch in Blender. Nevertheless, I would still recommend learning Blender from scratch, using the huge variety of video tutorials that are available. In principle, you should be able to import a collada (dae) file from sketchup directly into Blender, but it doesn't always work. (I have seen sketchup-generated dae files that crash Blender instantly as soon as you try to import them.)

[Gaia Clary]

It would be very helpful to report such issues to the blender bug reporter  :matte-motes-impatient: Especially when an importfile crashes blender.

[Scooter Hollow]

The most important thing to fix with SketchUp files is to take it into Blender and do a Remove Doubles on all of the components. Also, in addition to sketchup files sometimes just not importing at all, sometimes the scale will be ridiculous, and it will be so large you might not even see that it got imported.

 

SU is definitely a lot easier to learn and use than Blender, though, so there's some value in using SU for some things and Blender for others.

[VesperiaStarfall]

I was worried this would happen. I was really curious why a lot of builders don't use sketch up because it's a lot easier to use.

Unfortunately, I don't know a lot about blender to do all of that, so I'll learn how to use blender instead.

[Johan Laurasia]

I was going to suggest learning Blender over using Sketch Up.  Sketch Up is easier, but at the expense of create a proper model for SL.  

Blender isin't so tough really.  There's quite a few tutorials on YouTube and Vimeo, and BlenderArtists.com is also a great learning resource.  Forum members are as eager to help out as you'll find here in the SL forum.  I have a few different tutorials myself including a beginner tutorial, and I highly recommend Andrew Price's blender tutorials.  Most of them are on YouTube, but are best accessed though his website Blenderguru.com.

If you're already pretty good with Sketch Up, getting into Blender won't be that bad.  Yes, Blender is more complex, but you can still do simple stuff quite simply.  As time goes by and your abilities grow, you'll be able to use the more complex features of Blender.

There's also a phyics engine within Blender, so you can, for example, make a tablecloth by dropping a cloth on a plane, allow it to setlle, then apply the cloth modifier and export the resultant shape to SL.

My tutes are available on http://youtube.com/johanlaurasia

[VesperiaStarfall]

Cool, ty for the info. I'll check out some videos today.