Hey Folks, this is one of those… “I am now officially lost” sorts of events. I like to send some of my Sketchup Pro 2019 work to Maya, because a lot of people work in Maya and …“Hey, why not?” Increasing exposure and all that. I have used the SimLab-Soft SKP to Maya importer with no problems at all. Sketchup Pro is now updated to 2019 and Maya to 2018 and (at least for my importations…) no go. I made a set of YouTube videos on what is going wrong (Parts 01 and 02).
Here’s their links:
Part 01 (13 min) Forest Church SKP to Maya Discussion Part 01 - YouTube
Part 02 (16 min) Forest Church SKP to Maya Discussion Part 02 - YouTube
I made a page at my website that goes over all of this including availability to download the SKP and the Maya files involved.
Here’s that webpage URL:
I’m just totally stumped. I added an image from one of the mp4’s I made in Camtasia to include in the YouTube video, I thought it was just cool looking.
All help appreciated. Dr. Gray
Admittedly I did not feel like watching 29 minutes of videos on YouTube to see your issue, so my comment might not be valid. Maya should be able to open an .OBJ or .DAE files natively. Have you tried exporting in those formats?
Thanks Ben. I will try that. I exported out of Sketchup a few years ago and after 45 minutes it was still exporting or was in a failure loop. I could not tell what Sketchup was doing but I guess the Sketchup export now is more reasonable. I will see.
I did try an FBX export and import and I got the model in Maya with no geometry errors, but no textures. The texture stuff at least via Google seems to be an FBX issue. Will continue to try the various Sketchup exporting file types. Slow process pg
Thanks Ben. I tried DFX and as part of the export process, you get a folder with all the textures. I couldn’t get success with DFX but it did show me that, specifically with this church project, I have a lot of drawing activity but not a lot of textures. The church only has about 10 textures. I need to learn about textures anyway in Maya so I will see it as an opportunity to learn. I got the “big” Maya as a teacher but that will run out. On a $ basis this means i must plan to go to Maya LT and LT only imports FBX anyway. My weight of the robot series has a bunch of textures. I don’t look forward to fighting with that but…
One issue at a time I suppose. pg
Well hello pbacot Maya has some advantages. I also created the pistonrobot and I need to rig it to show its motion. No way to do that in Maya unless one understands Maya. So I upload stuff to Maya to try to climb that learning curve a little at a time. And this time uploading to Maya just wouldn’t work. I am having a little success with FBX just natively from Sketchup to Maya. Need to get those textures imported… I exported and imported and got textures. I saved and re-opened …no textures sigh. I think if one asks Maya to create a Maya file from a file that Maya sees as an import, then one must save the Maya output from this imported Maya file as a Maya file in a folder where the source import file came from. It could be that Maya is making some sort of an internal note to itself as to where Maya decided to store a “set” of texture files for a this Maya file that it created…why would anyone make something to be this complicated but I’m not sure yet. Must try again. Learning Maya. pg
Hey Folks, updates. I got this to work, at least for me. I guess the software people understand that they need to allow inter-connectivity, even though it tends (I think) to decrease their income, I guess they find the process they’ve created to be OK, but it sure seems complicated.
Anyway, for me:
ask Sketchup to export your Sketchup drawing as an FBX file, I found Sketchup will not export my whole drawing unless I first select the entire drawing, then choose the Sketchup FBX export option of only export selected area, I also chose these other options: export textures, flip xy, use drawing units.
example, my Sketchup file is drawing-drawing-drawing.skp
then Sketchup will (for FBX exports), send out two results, a file named
drawing-drawing-drawing.fbx and also a folder named drawing-drawing-drawing.
In Maya I removed all non-Maya native FBX plugins and I told Maya to load the native Maya FBX plugin (I set it to load this automatically).
Then I told Maya to import the FBX file and I navigated to where the drawing-drawing-drawing.fbx file was located.
To keep myself from getting confused, I created a folder that I named superfolder-drawing-drawing-drawing. I made sure that the Sketchup created fbx file named drawing-drawing-drawing.fbx and the Sketchup created folder named drawing-drawing-drawing were both contained in the folder named superfolder-drawing-drawing-drawing.
Maya did import this fbx file, made a Maya drawing, and placed textures on the items in the drawing.
Probably because this is an architectural drawing, it seems that my Forest Church is way bigger than the default Maya bounding box. So, alas, almost totally impossible to coherently initially “see” any item inside Maya.
So, in Maya, I gave Maya permission to scale the drawing, and I scaled it on all three axes by 0.01, and there the drawing was. Haha yay for me.
I told Maya to save this file as a Maya file. I named it drawing-drawing-drawing.mb and saved it where I put all my Maya files.
Oh no…! When I re-opened it in Maya, geometry=OK, textures=gone.
However, if I save the Maya file drawing-drawing-drawing.mb in the folder I named superfolder-drawing-drawing-drawing, then, if I leave Maya and re-open Maya and ask Maya to open this Maya file that is contained in the same folder as where the textures exported by Sketchup were sent to, then Maya opens the Maya file as a Maya file and it has all its textures inside Maya.
Whew!
This works for me at present. I may explore various combinations of where I place all these files and folders, but I doubt it, because it can get very complex trying to remember: which Sketchup file was it? What are the textures in Sketchup? What did I call it in Maya? And with what I outlined above, even if I forget the details of all these file names, I can refresh my memory because everything is all saved in that superfolder. And, of note, the only reason that superfolder exists is because I created it. Sketchup and also Maya do not (at least for me) create and manage that overarching folder where everything is all kept together in one package. Dr. Gray
I have moved this out of the ‘Gallery’ category into the basic Sketchup category, it’s certainly not a Gallery subject. Many people do not look at gallery posts, you may get more responses this way.
It probably should be in extensions or even developers but…
Dr. Gray
