Sketchup 25 now allows us to grab areas of 3d terrain fairly easily but, the output is sadly of
little use in real-time due to two things that need improving.
As an example, I have just created a 20km x 20km area but even though ‘low’ res was selected for polygons and texturing it create over 1.8 ‘million’ polygons (3 vertice) and 144 texture patterns.
This is not ‘low’ content.
What is needed is a better filtering method to either define polygon output or have a wider range from high to low.
The other problem is that ‘all’ the texture patterns are incorrect sizes. Though often named 2048 they are in fact numbers like 2050 x 2050 and weird shapes like 1538 x 2050, 2050 x 514. ‘Every’ pattern is incorrectly sized.
Improve these two areas and this is starting to become a usable tool for terrain creation.
to be faire it’s not a ‘small’ area.
it’s 400 million m2
1,8 million polygons, that means each polygon is roughly… 222 m2? that’s a big polygon.
these are on the sides of your terrain. upon import, SU will trim the bits that are not needed. so if one of the tile is partly outside of your view, it’ll be trimmed.
the reason for these tiles is to have a decent quality in big areas. if you only had one massive material, it would be super massive. here you have many small tiles.
sketchup was made for a building (and its immediate surrounding) scale.
you’re talking about a city / urban scale. off course you’ll run into some limitations
Weve just done a very complex area in Scotland with 260km of coastline in under 100,000 polys and 22 4096 x 4096 patterns.
That is normal to us, I’m afraid the output of sketchup is just a mess which may look ok and run in a fashion on on some systems but isn’t the standard of work we would want to supply to
any military or simulator user, and wouldn’t be accepted by them.
Martin
That’s not what SketchUp is designed for, though. Sounds to me as if you’re using the wrong tool for the job you need to do. Surely there are tools designed for modeling large areas that you could use.
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like dave said. maybe not the best tool for the job.
Not the best, but there aren’t many that are and its that close with just some very small tweaks could be very useful tool at its price point and ease of use now.