Skip to main content

From SketchUp free to Unity3D

While there are many ways to go from SketchUp to Unity3D Game engine, having the free version poses serious limits.

  • In the Pro version, FBX and Collada export are intergrated and work fine. However, the free version has problems. While there is Collada export in the Free version, Unity3D fails to properly import the geometry.
  • One approach is to use conversion software. The Open Source Blender is known to be able to import DAE files from SketchUp and export them into an FBX file that Unity3D understands.
  • Another approach is with the LightUp plugin for SketchUp. This is not free, but is a good approach to do shadow and light baking and has an integrated FBX exporter that works fine in Unity3D.

But you can also extend SketchUp with ruby scripts.

On http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=33448 you can download an OBJ exporter script (the old Alias Wavefront format) which Unity3D understands. It is best to export into a separate folder, as depending on how you textured your model, multiple materials could be generated.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
2 comments
Read more

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 9 - using IfcConvert)

This is part 9 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss the IfcConvert utility from the IfcOpenShell Open Source IFC Library to preprocess an IFC model for integration with Unity. This is (finally?) again a coding post, with some scripts which are shared to build upon. Conversion of IFC into Unity-friendly formats The strategy with this approach is that you preprocess the IFC-file into more manageable formats for Unity integration. Most Web-platforms do some sort of pre-processing anyway, so what you see in your browsers is almost never an IFC-file, but an optimised Mesh-based geometric representation. However, it wouldn’t be BIM-related if we’d limit ourselves to the geometry, so we will parse the model information as well, albeit using another, pre-processed file. IFC to Wavefront OBJ I used a test IFC-model and used the IfcConvert-utility converted it into OBJ en XML formats. The default way to use it is very simple: ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Getting BIM data into Unity (Part 8 - Strategies to tackle IFC)

This is part 8 of a series of posts about getting BIM data into Unity. In this post, we’ll discuss IFC as a transfer format towards Unity. As with the previous post, this is not a coding post, although hints and examples are provided. Open BIM and IFC Everybody who ever met me or heard me present on a conference or BIM-lecture will not be surprised to hear that I’m a strong believer in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), an open standard, with already two versions published as an ISO standard, being IFC2x2 and IFC4 (but surprisingly not IFC2x3 which is widely used). In the ideal world, this would be the format to use to transfer BIM data into another environment, such as Unity. So what are our options? Looking in the Unity Asset Store Assimp is a library which supports multiple formats, including IFC. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/trilib-unity-model-loader-package-91777   I did a few attempts, but alas without any success. It is po...
Post a Comment
Read more