Importing from sketchup and transparency issues

Questions & Answers
1

I have a scene in sketchup and i want to convert it to fbx and import it into unity. I had to export my model as “google earth”, open the kmz with winrar and extracted the .dae and texture folders. I then ran this model through the Autodesk fbx converter. I tried exporting using sketchup’s export option (my friend has pro) and even tried playup tools, but when it is imported into unity, faces are missing, despite the normals being correct in sketchup. The only other success i would have is to use blender as an intermediary converter, but then i lose all my texture / material references in my mesh.

Is there a problem with unity or sketchup’s exporter dealing with normals / dae files output from sketchup? I know sketchup is a nurbs program, and models in triangles, so it should work fine with unity (unity is a triangle based engine.)

My current mesh has the textures applied, but the position offsets are wrong. I tried changing the offset in unity by selecting the part with the texture, but it had no effect. My transparency texture also was not applied or referenced to in the conversion. When i reference it in unity inspector, it shows up as a black texture in unity.

I am also now unable to select objects, is there a way to “turn on” object selection again? I am in object “grab” mode, as depicted by the litle hand, but i still cannot select objects.

2

Sketchup is notoriously bad at exporting DAE. The only way I’ve found to deal with it at all is running through Blender (or similar). Not even Deep Exploration deals with it well. I wish Google would fix it.

I may be mistaken, but at least at some point, Sketchup didn’t care about normals so much, assumed all polygons to be two-sided. It may do this internally. So exporting to formats which do care is problematic. Either you double all the surfaces (ok by me), or take a guess at which way the surface should be (a harder problem, but Google is full of geniuses, right?) Sorry for the rant. It’s been a pain since I started using it in 2006 or so.

What the world needs is a good open-source algorithm for finding the right normal, and fix the surfaces accordingly (both poly winding direction and/or normal generation). So that it might be used as a plugin in importers and exporters. Blender’s Recalculate Outside, for example, tries to do this. Not always well.