What Will SketchUp Make Import?

Here are a few other threads which address this subject to varying degrees. I don’t see a solution in there, but maybe someone else will.

Here’s an article which reports DAE import failures in SketchUp Make.


FROM THE ARTICLE (quote function of forum seems broken)

How to import Collada into Sketchup Make 2017

This is a simple step by step process. Let’s get right to it.

  • In Sketchup go to File->Import.
  • Make sure that you have .dae files visible by choosing it as the file type.
  • Browse for the file, select it and hit Import.
  • Click in the viewport to place the object.

Sometimes I have had issues with textures when importing into Sketchup. It can be a single face somewhere in the mesh missing or a face that does not get textured. It is not very common but it happens. What usually fixes it is if we go back into Blender and just slightly move one or more vertices that is attached to the face just a tiny bit and export again.

DAE files from TurboSquid do import correctly in to SketchUp Make.
So the focus shifts to how MakeHuman constructs it’s DAE files.

I see MakeHuman is using COLLADA version=“1.4.0”
whereas SketchUp uses COLLADA version=“1.4.1”

As TIG suggested perhaps I’m going to have to learn how to edit MakeHuman DAE files so they are readable by SketchUp. I’ve tried his suggestion, but there must be more to it in the case of MakeHuman.

All day wasted on this, just to transfer a file from one place to another…

Here’s some good news, bad news. Models from RenderPeople.com go easily in to SketchUp Make (and likely other versions) and they arguably look better than MakeHuman. But, they cost a bunch of money, whereas MakeHuman is all the characters you want for free. RenderPeople.com has a handful of free models you can experiment with.

You are doing much of the detective work…

I can’t get your DAE to import into SketchUp and use the PNG textures, no matter how I edit the DAE file or locate the PNGs etc.
However, If you import the DAE into Blender [with the paths properly mapped to the PNGs] the it loads OK and will texture OK…
Next, if you export the file to DAE it arrives with the PNGs [in the same folder], then if you import that DAE into SketchUp it’s all good and has the textures etc.
Although you’ll probably want to smooth some the form to get rid of the edges ?

Thank you for confirming this TIG, and for helping out in this thread, appreciated.

Ah, good news. I had tried running the model through Blender, but probably wasn’t doing it right, as I know nothing about properly mapping paths in Blender. All I really know about Blender is import and export. I did learn today how to get textures to show in Blender so that’s a start.

Thanks to you I now know that Blender conversions can work, so I’ll focus on learning how to make that work. Thanks for that!

As luck will have it, Chipp Walters offered some good beginning Blender tutorials in another thread which I have downloaded and will dig in to.

Thanks for keeping this project alive TIG, as I really want to get MakeHuman in to SketchUp, but was running out of ideas.

Making some progress! I imported the MakeHuman character (DAE) in to Blender, and fiddled around in an ignorant manner until I could see textures on the model. Then I exported out of Blender (DAE), and imported in to SketchUp Make.

Here’s an image which shows the results. MakeHuman screen shot on left, Blender in the middle, SketchUp on the right side.

So I have the textures on the character in SketchUp now, but the skeleton is showing through the textures.

I’m guessing (hope I’m wrong) that there is no way to hide the skeleton in SketchUp, so it’s back to Blender for some kind of adjustment. No idea what though.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments in this incredible story, the longest slowest file transfer in the history of 3D!!! :slight_smile:

Yes, you are wrong. :wink:
https://help.sketchup.com/en/sketchup/softening-smoothing-and-hiding-geometry

1 Like

Yea! I’m wrong!!! Whoopee!! :slight_smile: That’s great, cause I can do something about that.

Really making progress now. The soften procedure is pretty time consuming, but this is the first time I’ve done it, so that explains that.

Model is pretty clean now, except for a puzzling line or two I don’t know what to do with. Here’s another screen shot which shows a line which seems to divide two parts of the model’s head.

Any tips regarding what’s going here will be appreciated, thanks.

Do you get less of those if you turn off Profiles?

@colin - Hey, good suggestion, thanks. Turning off profiles dimmed the line a bit, and turning off edges removed it completely. Um, there is still a LOT about SketchUp which I’ve yet to learn.

I tried saving the character out of SketchUp and then re-importing it in to another SketchUp file. So far, hoping to be wrong again, it looks like I’ll need to hide the skeleton every time I import this character in to SketchUp? If yes, then next step for me will be to learn a more efficient way of cleaning up the character than what I did the first time.

This is all very good news. Now I can have people in the house I’m building. Please stand by while I do the happy dance of joy.

Interesting. I’m not familiar with MakeHuman. Any experience with and comparison to Poser?

My understanding is that I can’t bring animated characters in to SketchUp. Right? Can you confirm?

Wouldn’t it be great if I was wrong about this too? :slight_smile:

Can the animations go into TwinMotion? That’s the kind of thing you take a SU model into TM for.

I’m sorry, I can’t really compare MakeHuman to Poser. But as it happens, I just yesterday decided to take a closer look at Poser. I have used Daz, which seems comparable to Poser.

MakeHuman is just for creating characters, and I believe Poser does much more, such as animate. MakeHuman is free, Poser costs $200 I think. Daz is like Poser but free, well, the software is free, the characters can cost you plenty.

You can animate a MakeHuman character pretty easily by bringing it in to Mixamo. This is limited to pre-made animations. You can also animate MakeHuman characters in a much more customized way in Blender, which I’ve not yet done.

You can kind of animate MakeHuman characters in a video editor such as Hitfilm (they have a free version). That is, you can move the entire character around the scene, rotate and scale it, add lights and shadows, but you can’t animate arms and legs etc.

Finally, you can make a MakeHuman character talk by layering an animated face on top of the character in a video editor. You can animate the face and add sound in CrazyTalk, which is very reasonably priced at $50 I think, or $30 on sale, something like that. This method layers an animated 2D image (with sound) on to the face of a 3D character, which works so long as the character is directly facing the camera. Here’s a quick video I did a few years ago illustrating that procedure.

If I could bring animated talking characters in to SketchUp I could probably leave my video editor behind and work entirely in one software, but I’m guessing this isn’t in the cards.

I had Poser a long time ago (like pre-OSX!), and hadn’t thought about it in a while, but I just saw a notice of it being on sale for $80. If you’re on MacOSX, how are you running MakeHuman?

Sorry, your mention is the first I’ve heard of TwinMotion. I’m pretty new to 3D. For other newbies to TwinMotion, they have a pretty impressive video intro here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiVeP6muWbw#:~:text=Twinmotion%20is%20a%20real-time,the%20power%20of%20Unreal%20Engine.

A quick Google search found this:

The MSRP for Twinmotion is $499 USD for a perpetual license; prices may vary by region and may include applicable taxes. For a limited time, Epic is offering a 50% discount, and including free upgrades to all releases until December 31, 2021.

Unreal Engine is free, and TwinMotion is a paid add-on??

Hey, thanks for the Poser sale tip! That’s the kind of money I’m used to spending.

MakeHuman is available for Windows and Mac. Not sure about Linux.

They have a forum here: http://www.makehumancommunity.org/

A quick search and I found a comment that the last Mac version was 1.1 something and the current one is 1.2 something, so it seems not too out of date.

TwinMotion started out for free in beta last, year, but now that it’s released, I guess they started charging for it. There are other people here that are more up on it than I am.

This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.