No, it doesn’t. It has OBJ export, though.
Agreed… it’s unfortunate that it comes in as one big mesh merged together. I’ll do a followup lesson on manually ‘clipping’ out or separating above ground objects as having the ability to toggle between existing and proposed, etc would be great. Drone Deploy (to my knowledge) doesn’t export as point clouds like other scanning software… Just the triangulated obj mesh.
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You’re right. Quad Face tools adds the OBJ import function.
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I tried QuadFace tool’s obj importer and it either couldn’t import a file this size or took so long that I got impatient and force quit SU. I’d be happy to hear if others have a different experience or tricks as the blender step is quick and painless, but would always prefer to use 100% SU when possible. But! that said, knowing the blender method is good anyway as it lets you re-attach UV-wrapped materials which sometimes get lost in other obj files.
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Hi there.
I’ve down a little bit of this kind of thing by stepping back conceptually from the tech and thinking practically.
The principle I use is that the virtual needs to match reality:
- The skp model needs to be accurately drawn from the reality, (there’s a lot of geo-accurate stuff available for the architectural industry)
- The field of view in skp is set the same as the physical camera, (drone or otherwise)
- The location, route, speed and orientation of the camera in your new skp world needs to be the same as the path the real drone/camera took.
You can then compare a selection of frames from your drone video to a similar selection from the skp movie output in a movie editor. A few tweaks of camera location, path and orientation will be needed within skp to get a smooth transition. I would have the two apps open side by side on the screen to compare them. If you are able to overlay them in your video app that would be best for comparison, and of course you’ll need that to produce the transition anyway.
Most of what I’ve done in this way has been static admittedly, but the principles seem the same.
I can’t create classes with the software i use [3dzephyr] but can’t you create the individual meshes and then combine them as separate components in SU? When i create high/low poly meshes for export each OBJ has the same origin/pivot so the same principle should apply. This also applies to the proxies - import the high/low versions for use in SU.
As a basic workaround to the contours problem have you considered the drape c points plugin to make a simplified mesh from the imported model? See workflow here [Plugin] Drape Cpoints • sketchUcation • 1
Wow! Very cool.
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You can export point cloud to las from Drone deploy https://support.dronedeploy.com/docs/data-export-formats and do modeling with Undet for Sketchup https://www.undet.com/blog/how-to-model-from-point-cloud-in-sketchup/
I like to use Trimble business center (TBS) we use the HCE edition although base will work best for you. The system is made for civil construction and will export in many files including .skp although I use .dxf or .dwg as my normal import into Sketchup
Good write up, I current use Trmble HCE to Sketchup through .DWG , .DXF or straight .skp then pull in stereotopographic camera meshes from Zedfu to Unreal then imported via plugin for objects near camera that need more visual attention. I end in Lumion which has allowed me to render my current model at 210 million poly-lines
Thanks @WilksEarthworks.
You’ve reminded me to update my original process. Two plugins have just been released at the same time that simplify this process - Transmuter (pc only) and Skimp (mac and PC) that allow for both importing of OBJs with their textures preserved as well as geometry reduction tools!
Here is video of same Drone Deploy file from above now done all in SU with Skimp. (Note that I’ve edited out the processing time to keep video file under 5m).
Original full size Blender import - 495,000 edges
Skimp geometry reduction import - 136,000 edges
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Thanks for sharing the video! Skimp was designed to solve problems exactly like this…importing high poly OBJ drone scans into SketchUp very fast.
If anyone else is interested you find it here:
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hello,
how do we import OBJ with Pro?
tks
Rui Rego
The same way as I indicated four years ago: