Collada - Sketchup - Support - Thread

hi to all,

i am staatsfeind, a modeler and manager for a crysis
modification call “Casus Belli”.

i began modeling one year ago with sketchup and
i love the easy handling to relatively fast create
structures for the mod. at that time it was always
quite some additional work to export the sketchup models
into 3dsmax to texture them in there.

since collada is working with sketchup as well (kmz->dae)
i am a real fan of this project and would like to thank you
for your work as it already saved me hundreds of hours !!!

nevertheless collada is yet not targeted on sketchup as its
the blender support that made it work for sketchup (if i understood
everything right !) and i would really really appreciate if
you could target sketchup more in the future.

eventhough collada saved me alot of hours there are still
quite some errors occuring where its hard to find support for.

thats why i hope i can find help here in future.

as i am no professional in 3d-modeling nor in programming i would
be very thankful if you could have that in mind when reading my questions etc. :wink:

here some points i collected:

  • sketchup material names not being converted into the mtl’s
    (the texture path is easy to fix, though no real problem)

  • due to sketchup it can easily happen that you have
    a line doubled which sometimes cause the converter to stop
    giving you the error “could not convert - degenerated faces found”

  • what causes the error for following message:
    “mesh contains unsupported primitive source lines” ?

  • texture names are being changed to “texture0.jpg,…,textureX.jpg”
    instead leaving the original name.

  • more to follow…


i understand that collada yet is not designed especially for sketchup
dae’s but especially with sketchup there is no real alternative.
yes, with the pro version you can export in different file formats
but as there is no crysis exporter support there is no way to get
around 3dsmax. though collada is pretty unique.

thank you in advance,
staatsfeind
www.frenchtouchstudio.com

Can you explain what you mean by, “sketchup material names not being converted into the mtl’s” ?
The texture names are converted in order to support dae readers that do not support file names w/ unicode characters.
You should try exporting w/ the export edges option turned off.
Do you have a SketchUp file you can share? Thanks.

yes sure !

for this example i took a rather simple ruin-tower which
i had already exported 2 month ago.

funny thing is: while preparing it for example screenshots
and therefore exporting it, errors occured which didnt 2 month
ago with collada 3.5 (i think it was). before it worked.
seems to indicate having to reinstall 3.5 instead… ?

anyways, here some facts:

1) the export

- kmz -
usually i had to export through the kmz-file (google earth format)
which contains the dae-file which i have to extract.

for exporting kmz files there are no further options.

- dae -
if i directly export as dae-file out of sketchup there is no
option to export without edges or does triangulate indicate edging ?

2) the material names

here the material naming in sketchup:

on the next screen the mtl file with the three positions:

  1. = material name
  2. = texture name
  3. = two more materials added ? why ?

number one needs to be named the same way like in sketchup.
this is very important if you model many smaller objects that
share the same mtl in order to reduce texture-load ingame.

number two would be good if it had the same name as the original
texture-file. but thats not that important because easy to change.

number three doesnt happen very often - in this case i totally dont
know why its being created. if i export as kmz->dae->convert
it only adds one extra material, if i export directly as dae there are two.

3) error reports

as you can see on this screenshots there are several errors.
funny as hell that almost all before mentioned errors now occure in
this one example. never had that before ! is that a sign ? :wink:

ok, this one here is simple and due the process doing it via kmz
and also not that problem:

the next one contains two errors that i experience
every now and then:

though thank you for reading, i hope this report helps
a bit and additionally i added the file as attachment.
i am really happy someone finally tries to help me because
i felt somehow lost with the problems.
i “lead” two more sketchup modelers that need answers i
couldnt find myself :-/

the most annoying problem is the “mesh node contains unsupported primitive lines”
error message which i had never before collada 3.7.
so yes, i will reinstall back to 3.5 but that doesnt help with the other problems.

kind regards,
simon aka staatsfeind

Hi Simon,

It’s not clear to me that this is problem involving COLLADA yet. I.e. you haven’t shown any issues with .dae content specifically. Have you contacted Crytek about these issues?

Sang can you post a link to a Google Sketchup support forum or bug tracker for Simon?

Thanks.