texture coordinate mapping

Ok, so I have a collada file that was obtained from Sketchup (free version) by exporting as google earth. I rename the .kmz file to a .zip, extract and there’s a .dae within.

I am using the Collada DOM library to load and render the model. That works fine.

The problem I’m having is that I now need to texture the model. Sketchup exported UV Coordinates in the dae file, so I figured I was good to go – I just needed to create a texture that wraps around the model properly to display as I want it to.

So I read up a little bit on UV coordinates, and as I understand it, they correspond to a percentage value of the width and height of an image… so usually between 0 and 1, but can be otherwise for looping textures or whatever. In my case, they are between 0 and 1.

From here I thought I could calculate X and Y values on the image by multiplying the UV coordinates by the size of image I want to use as a texture and then draw lines (per triangle) to show which parts of the image will map to which triangles. I wrote a simple PHP script utilizing GD to create this image.

The image looks similar to what I would expect, except that many faces are overlapping. I would have thought no face would overlap another. Would that be the way that the UV coordinates are created by Sketchup or am I misunderstanding what the UV coordinates represent?

Hi,
your understanding of the uvs is correct.
But SketchUp exports texcoords that are not really useful, if your SketchUp model has no texture assigned to the geometry.
I created a simple box without a texture assigned to it and exported it to COLLADA and found the s and t values of the uvs to be equal to one of the position coordinates. This uvs are not really helpful to texture your model.

However, if your model has a texture assigned, the exported uvs are as expected.