After several years using V-Ray to render my Sketchup models, I make a decision to render all of my Sketchup models in Blender, why? Because it’s totally free!!!. Both of Cycles & Eevee are very great built-in blender render engines.
The only problem that i found is Blender doesn’t have feature to import Sketchup files. Exporting the sketchup models to .dae, .obj or other formats then import it into Blender causes some problems.
But now i’ve found the solution, there is a Blender Add-Ons named Skp Importer that can import Sketchup models with all of the materials nicely.
Very solid renders - are you having to do a lot of UV work to get the materials to map properly? Or are you finding that as long as they sit right on the SketchUp model they look ok in the renders?
I found that this add-on exported materials nicely, what I get in Blender is look the same as what I look in SketchUp, so I don’t have to do extra UV Work in Blender if I’ve done it in SketchUp. But in some cases, I do UV Work in blender to get different look for some skp component objects.
You should look at the Substance for Blender plugin it works well as a find and replace material editor for the SU files and you dont need to open anything in substance painter (but you do need a license key).
I successfully imported my SU files (2 of them) into Blender. One other though failed, it only imported a small portion of the model? I suppose it might be the size perhaps? Drawn to scale its nearly 400m long and the actual dae. file is 140 mb.
@trampy thank you for your reply. I’m not sure if 3ds will work on my Chromebook, I will try it though. I did notice though with watching a Youtube tutorial for Sketchup to Blender that you need to rescale your model? Is that correct?
@trampy I think I worked it out. I added the ‘clean up’ extension for SU and now it seems to work fine. All I need to do now is get more experienced with Blender. Thanks so much for your help Trampy.
That will be some amazing help Trampy. One of the major issues I am having with working on large models is setting the lighting and camera. I’ll go through those videos as I can; like you my time is limited each day.
I’ve been playing around with the camera settings and angles. The problem I’ve been having is that when I go to render, the image I get is often only a 1/4 of the actual model.
please use the Blender forum and create a topic, there. The way discourse forums work is that it is actually one big pile of posts and mixing problems from other software messes things up for users that are looking for their problems with SketchUp camera settings.
- are you having to do a lot of UV work to get the materials to map properly? Or are you finding that as long as they sit right on the SketchUp model they look ok in the renders?
