dim3 Forum

This is a bit outlandish and out there but wouldn't it make it easy to have urban levels or anything with buildings if we could use google sketchup and then import that into the editor/animator?

Why not just import them as .obj files?
http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/a...swer=36203

Only the pro version exports to OBJ. The standard one only saves .skp files.

[Update: 30s of googling reveals that SketchUp can export to KMZ which can be imported to blender, which can export to OBJ. Of course, you'll lose all of SketchUp's lighting (and possibly the tiling textures as well), but that's a limitation of dim3's OBJ importer]

cyst Wrote:Only the pro version exports to OBJ. The standard one only saves .skp files.

Then just get the pro version or use a different modeler.

Whats so hard about creating Urban buildings in the editor, or wings, or blender? Besides, you can edit walls and stuff in the editor much easier than using SketchUp and then importing to Dim3. (Hell, creating an urban area is easy to do in the editor anyway.)

Even with the pro version, converting to OBJ loses a lot of information that the editor could use. SketchUp files are conceptually a lot more similar to dim3 maps than OBJ files are -- they contain primitives with their own model spaces, multiple tiling textures, point lights throughout -- all of which is lost if you import through OBJ.

dim3 editor is designed for making buildings; SketchUp is designed for making buildings (and is, frankly, better at it); OBJ is designed for objects. Not to say that .skp importing should be a priority at this point, but it is a valuable suggestion, and export+import is not the same.