supersparkplug
Jun '12

Recently, a client sent my place of work a complex model of a building they'd like us to work with... In Google Sketchup. I've been tasked with dealing with this and texturing it. As I'm sure we all know, Sketchup isn't exactly a very capable program and most computers I've attempted to open it on can barely run it or slow down because of it, including my own (and my computer is no slouch). I was hoping to export it to .obj, .fbx, or SOMETHING I could use with better 3D programs such as Maya or 3DSMax but I've been running into a multitude of problems.

1) Sketchup refuses to export to anything else most of the time (it crashes a lot). The only time it exported was when I deleted all the extra stuff within the building and only exported the walls. I was able to get it to export to obj. It worked, but I'm trying to get the inner parts of the building to render as well and every time I try, it renders for a long time only to completely crash.

2) I was able to get it to render the entire model and the inner part of the building through Sketchup thanks to a friend's really high end computer (Although the rendering took forever and it would always crash when exporting to .fbx). However, whenever I try to open those models on any other computer, everything freezes indefinitely or crashes. I exported the files in .obj, .3ds, and .fbx (The FBX exports always crashed at 99%, but left over what was rendered afterwards). All of them have the same problem. The closest I was able to get was with 3DSMax, which started importing it but later refused, saying that it didn't have the memory to import so many faces (I even tried manually telling it NOT to import the meshes with a whole bunch of faces, still the same problem since there were so many other meshes)

This has been haunting me for the past little while. I don't even know how they managed to create such a huge model in sketchup. The sketchup model is 39MB and the exports I've managed end up being anywhere from 100-400MB (and over 1GB for the FBX). I REALLY need advice on how to proceed with doing this as I am currently baffled as to what to do. I've tried everything I can think of...

Does anyone have any idea what I can do from here?

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    Jun '12

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    Jun '12
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joojaa
Jun '12

Well you could continue to to chunk the model into pieces and see what the export is doing see it may be duplicating a lot of stuff unnecceserily. Most likely each mesh comes up somehow mangled.

Thing is tough, this is one of the reasons not to clean other peoples work . See theres no magick in throwing polygons into the scene (yeah i have seen a 6 billion polygon scene, which at the time was about 1000 as much as i could handle, had to write my own software for this). But the real thing is your interested in the scene that has just the right amount of polys, not too much or less. If you miss this target you end up doing a lot of extra work.  And then the client tells you they did most of the work :stuck_out_tongue:

If your really on top of the gme tough, then you could try to parse the exported foles yourself an see what the problem may be.