Sketchup vs Blender

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

[animats]

13 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Perhaps it should be mentioned that Google has nothing to do with SketchUp anymore, except they may still use it themsevles for some Google Earth stuff.

SketchUp was launched in 2000 by a company named @Last Software. Google bought the whole company in 2006 but only held on to SketchUp for six years before they sold it to Trimble.

It's not a bad program as such either. It's just that when people try to use ot for game/virtual world modelling, they're expecting it to do a job it was never meant to do. SketchUp is an entry level CAD (Computer Assisted Design) applications, it's meant for static models where it doesn't matter much if the model is so high poly it takes a minute or ten for it to render.

It's actually a bit of the same with Blender and Maya. They too are mainly made for high poly static meshes. But unlike SketchUp they come with a lot of extra functions that allow you to make render efficient models. If you know about those functions and how to use them that is. Many don't and that is one of the reasons why SL can be so laggy.

Yes. SketchUp is a constructive solid geometric (CSG) modeling system. Most modern engineering design programs are like that - SolidWorks, Autodesk Inventor, Fusion 360, TinkerCAD, FreeCAD, etc. Those are the tools you use to design real world buildings. All primitives are volumetric, and you get operations like union and intersection by default.

Second Life wants surface meshes, because it feeds them, with little modification, to OpenGL, which wants surface meshes. Most of the CSG-based programs will export meshes, but that's a sideline for them, so they don't have tools for mesh reduction and level of detail. Their real purpose is often to generate tool paths for machine tools, and the smooth surface you design in the CAD program had better come out smooth when you cut metal.

So you get too many triangles in the meshes they produce. This isn't a fundamental problem with CSG; it's a consequence of the asset pipeline lacking a smart mesh reduction stage. The major game engines have asset pipelines which allow mesh optimization between the artist and the game asset. SL lacks that, except for a terrible mesh decimator in the mesh uploader. (More smarts there would help a lot.)

Blender makes you deal with raw surface meshes. This is a pain, but you're operating at the same low level Second Life operates at, so you can optimize meshes manually. There are also lots of tools and add-ons for Blender to muck with meshes in various ways. Productivity is low, but good work is possible.

CSG with automated mesh optimization and generation of bump maps and normals for fine detail is what you probably really want. More user-friendly. Sinespace seems to be going down that road.

[Macrocosm Draegonne]

14 hours ago, animats said:

Yes. SketchUp is a constructive solid geometric (CSG) modeling system. Most modern engineering design programs are like that - SolidWorks, Autodesk Inventor, Fusion 360, TinkerCAD, FreeCAD, etc. Those are the tools you use to design real world buildings. All primitives are volumetric, and you get operations like union and intersection by default. 

Second Life wants surface meshes, because it feeds them, with little modification, to OpenGL, which wants surface meshes. Most of the CSG-based programs will export meshes, but that's a sideline for them, so they don't have tools for mesh reduction and level of detail. Their real purpose is often to generate tool paths for machine tools, and the smooth surface you design in the CAD program had better come out smooth when you cut metal.

So you get too many triangles in the meshes they produce. This isn't a fundamental problem with CSG; it's a consequence of the asset pipeline lacking a smart mesh reduction stage. The major game engines have asset pipelines which allow mesh optimization between the artist and the game asset. SL lacks that, except for a terrible mesh decimator in the mesh uploader. (More smarts there would help a lot.)

Blender makes you deal with raw surface meshes. This is a pain, but you're operating at the same low level Second Life operates at, so you can optimize meshes manually. There are also lots of tools and add-ons for Blender to muck with meshes in various ways. Productivity is low, but good work is possible.

CSG with automated mesh optimization and generation of bump maps and normals for fine detail is what you probably really want. More user-friendly. Sinespace seems to be going down that road.

Yes which is why its not that intelligent to use Sketchup for making game assets, the two tools are for very different purposes - Sketchup being a very limited set of purposes - Blender being the one app to rule them all, that nothing else on earth can compare too.  The short time I spent with Sketchup was totally cut short because of my awareness of Blender lol.