Exporting to collada format in meters?

After much hair pulling, I realized why the units of my dae exported from Sketchup were showing the wrong units in Meshlab. It appears Sketchup is exporting in inches, despite the fact I have units set to meters in Sketchup.

Is it possible to change this behavior? I must have units in meters so meshlab can compute inertia in the appropriate units (among other reasons).

Sketchup Pro 2017 on OSX

strange bug indeed. Have you tried using another format (fbx or something else?)
With fbx for instance, you can set the export units in the export-options.

Collada is xml: I searched my hard drive for .dae files, and mine are noted as either:

model.dae: unit meter=“0.0254” name=“inch” /
mug.dae: unit meter=“1.000000”/

So model.dae is converting inches, and mug.dae is using meters. The Kronos group states in the schema: “The meter attribute specifies the measurement with respect to the meter. The default value for the meter attribute is “1.0”.”

So why don’t you just edit it to what you want, but my guess is that the SketchUp template you use affects that.

Hi Barry,

Any specific tips or processes on how to make the dae convert to meters from SketchUp? There is a user who says they are using a Meters template in SketchUp, but dae is still exporting as inches.

If the model is in metric meters, scale it by 39.37007874015748 and export the DAE file. It will then generally be correctly interpreted by most systems. For example, an exported 39.37007874015748 meter cube imports as a 1 meter cube from the DAE file.