Getting from SketchUp to Unity with shadows and lighting

The following short (and silent - for now) videos present a full overview of getting a model from SketchUp into Unity3D. It uses the demo-version of the LightUp plug-in for SketchUp, which is fully functional (for a while). This works with the free and the Pro versions of Unity and SketchUp, on Windows and OSX.

The model in SketchUp and lighting it with LightUp

LightUp 4 SketchUp (1) Inside SketchUp from Stefan Boeykens on Vimeo.
This video describes how to lighten a SketchUp model with the LightUp plugin. I'm using the demo version of LightUp (v1.1) inside SketchUp 8 Pro for OSX.

Transferring the SketchUp model into Unity using FBX format

LightUp 4 SketchUp (2) Export FBX for Unity from Stefan Boeykens on Vimeo.
To get a SketchUp model, baked with Lightup, into Unity3D, you can use the integrated FBX exporter. This also works in the free version of SketchUp, which does not support FBX.

The integrated FBX exporter includes the baked lightmap and the secondary UV coordinates that are required in Unity, to have the two textures correctly mapped.

You should also install the Lightup support scripts in an "Editor" folder that you can create in your assets folder of your Unity project, as this will automatically assign the Lightmap shaders and load the lightmap textures.

Updating the SketchUp model and reloading it in Unity

LightUp 4 SketchUp (3) Modify and Update from Stefan Boeykens on Vimeo.
Even after we placed the SketchUp model inside Unity, we can continue working on it. After the scene was prepared in Unity with a default 3d person controller, we modified the geometry inside SketchUp, recalled LightUp and exported the model over the existing one, inside the Unity project Assets folder, to replace it.
Unity then reloads the whole scene, leaving all interaction in place.

Comments

Improve usage of BIM during early design phases

When I was collecting ideas for a book chapter on BIM (that seemed to never have emerged after that), I collected 10 ideas, which I believe still reflect good recommendations to improve the usage of BIM during the early design phases. These ideas are related to BIM software, but you can apply them in any flavor, as long as you can model with Building Elements, Spaces and have control over representation. Introduction This article gives an overview of several recommendations and tips, to better apply BIM applications and BIM methodologies, in the context of the early design phases. Many of these tips are applicable in any BIM application and they are based on experience gathered from teaching, researching and using BIM software. Sometimes they could help software developers to improve the workflow of their particular BIM implementation. Tip 1 : Gradually increase the amount of information In the early design phases, the architect makes assumptions and lays out the main design in...

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 0 - Introduction)

This post reflects on work that I carried out, elaborated during my guidance of a few Master thesis students, to better integrate BIM models into Unity. This will be a multi-part post. This makes each article a bit shorter to read, but allows more in-depth information overall. Hope you like it. Please comment with feedback and further improvements. Basic methodology Unity can import geometry from FBX and Collada (DAE) files primarily. There are a few other formats, but these are the preferred ones. When integrating CAD or BIM files into a realtime environment, you have to convert the geometry. During my Unity teaching and the writing of the book Unity for Architectural Visualization ( buy from Packt ), I’ve come up with a basic diagram explaining geometry exchange between CAD and BIM software and Unity. Throughout these posts, we’ll go more into detail. We start with ArchiCAD, but will tackle Revit in a follow-up post. Promised!

PythonOCC : Open Source interactive CAD shell (and how to run it on OSX)

What is PythonOCC? PythonOCC is an Open Source (LGPL) Python-wrapper for OpenCASCADE. So what is OpenCASCADE (OCC)? This is an advanced Open Source (custom license) modeling kernel, comparable to commercial engines, such as ACIS or Parasolid, which are used in quite some commercial CAD programs. When you want to develop CAD software, you could use OCC and write programs in C++. And why using Python? With this wrapper, you can create CAD and geometry scripts in Python, which is an interpreted Object-oriented scripting language. You can write almost "on-the-fly" and seriously reduce the implementation effort, by skipping the compiling-phase. You can even interact with a running program in the Python interpreter. Want to read more about this? The OpenCASCADE official website (currently Linux and Windows are officially supported) The PythonOCC website/blog (beware that the core of the actions happen in the development repositories). So far so good. Now the nasty, techn...

CAD, BIM & 3D

Search This Blog