Hello, very new to Sketchup. I saw a video on how to save an image from blender ( exported in .dae) but when imported to Sketchup it had no colors. The original in blender was a STL model I painted with the blender airbrush so it may be that it has no texture files but the colors painted on it are saved a different way? Does any one have advice where I can read up / learn how to transfer these objects with colors please?
Did you unwrapped, uv mapped and saved the texture in Blender, before exporting as a DAE file?
I barely know how to use blender all I did was a simple export, I will look up how to unwrapp, uv map and save the texture. Let me see if can do this. Thank you for pointing me in this direction
This may be a higher than my skill set for now. Will watch a few more videos on how to do this but this model may be to complex and might stick to the colorless version for now. I was watching a video on how to unwrap but when it told me to select seams I got lost.
The seams are lines that mark the a division on the UV unwrapping, your model has a lot of geometry, I bet it was made on an sculpting software, probably blender
or z brush, but it wasn’t made a retopology, that would make the UV unwrapping a lot easier.
So it would be difficult to transfer this with colors to sketch then? It is originally from a STL file for 3d printing a dragon mini. So I am better off trying to find a different model? There are 5 of them that I painted in blender ( the original stl was grey and I used the airbrush tool and went to town on them)
what did you import in sketchup, the stl or the dae file ?
can you share the blender file - or whatever you have really 
- so we can look at it ?
Sure let me delete everything in the blender folder so its not bloated. ( I think )
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Will not let me upload the blender file maybe the dae file?
Dragon heads.dae (742 Bytes)
uhhh, sketchup tells me the dae is empty, blender doesn’t open anything 
can you maybe send the blender file using wetransfer ?
What happens when you select the smart UV mapping option on blender?
What do you want to do with those models? If you’re going to 3D print, it doesn’t matter the textures.
I am very bad at visualizing things, and I have wanted for a while to design my game room for D&D games for my friends and family. I started last year on blender but I took several days just to get this far and even then I was going very slow.
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Yet on Sketch I was able to get to this point in a few hours the longest I spent was trying to figure out how to color the dragon heads but I wasn’t
able to.
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I uploaded the blender file on my dropbox I hope this helps? https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gv0bbokhkpofmfc70ybl8/Dragon-heads-2.blend?rlkey=4l3eva6g5cy0fa6ud5zma6an9&st=i1m8o5xd&dl=0
A short and simple presentation of two types of painting in Blender and the difference between the two - Vertex Paint and Texture Paint.
From what you can see in your Blender file, if you painted those models, then you probably used Vertex Paint and there were no visible strange artifacts because the geometry was very detailed (400k tris).
If you look with the Material Preview setting, you will see that one of the models is different from the others, having the pink color. This means that you probably tried to paint that one with the texture, but you didn’t know how.
If you want to use those models in SketchUp, it is advisable to first simplify them (retopologize) and reduce the number of polygons (tris) from 400,000 to under 10,000 (or less).
Then you need to create textures for them so you can export them to a file recognized by SketchUp.
You can do this by baking color attributes into a jpg file, and then you can export the model as a DAE or OBJ file, which will have a jpg file next to it, which is the texture.
If you use an extension like SimpleBake, then you can do it directly, otherwise you have to first UV unwrap the model, UV map it, and only then bake it.
Finally, you can export it as a DAE file and import it into SketchUp along with the associated textured material.
As you can see, there are a lot of steps to follow and this requires you to first learn the basics and then the more advanced ones in Blender, but also in SketchUp.
Both are advanced 3D graphics programs.
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Thank you for taking the time and breaking it down, I know I will re-visit this in the future when I learn a little more with sketchup. For now I will stick to using the black and white versions, and continue to pick up a little at a time. I will save what you said to try it out in the near future, but for now I will focus on learning some basic features for sketchup, again thanks for explaining.