Google Sketchup to Unreal

I’ve searched the forums for methods of importing my Sketchup models into Unreal. Unfortunately nothing has worked. Is it planned for better support for importing Sketch up models? I’m currently using Unity because it imports my models fine. But I’d love to switch to Unreal because the engine is more complete for what I’m trying to do and geared more towards it. I’ve tried all the tutorials I could get my hands on but have had no success.

You could import it to a 3D modeling program and export it as an fbx.

Sketchup won’t import directly like you said. You need to use a modeling program likes 3dsmax/maya/blender to import into then export as FBX into unreal.

When I exported the models straight from sketchup, they were without texture when I tried importing them into Unreal. I did try doing it through blender, but still got loads of error messages, however I was able to get the model textured, with a good collision mesh and was very happy… until I built the lighting… then it all fell to pieces and black squares appeared everywhere over the model. That was using jks11’s method which has been the most successful for me Sketchup to Unreal - Content Creation - Unreal Engine Forums. It’s just a shame it’s not working and gets so many different errors. Sketchup is so easy to use I think the developers behind Unreal engine are losing out on potential clients because they are overlooking an important market niche. I struggle with blender and could never afford any of the other packages… I’m really looking to learn how to use a game engine with my models from Sketchup, my models work fine in Game Guru, and in Unity… but in Unreal Engine I’m facing major challenges just trying to do such a simple thing. This would annoy me less if Unreal wasn’t such a good game engine, but truth be told it’s possibly one of the best games engines of the modern era. All they need is support for simple programs like Sketchup to encourage users starting out to be able to get involved and learn their engine. Which is what I want to do.

Yeah it would be nice if they had a few more import options. Blender is even open source; they could probably figure out a way to pull specific objects from a blend file.

The only thing that I could tell you is to check the normals and all that just to make sure it is up to par with a mesh made in a regular polygon based 3D modeler.

Well I’ve managed to get quite far importing from sketchup… I export as .dae and import to blender and then export to .fbx. I’m getting the models in looking perfect and textured, collision all setup, but as soon as I build the lighting it goes bad. It says the UV’s are overlapping and parts of the models go black. I’m particularly scared of using UV’s in blender because I’ve had bad experiences in the past trying to get the mapping to look right… with blender seeming to like creating warped and stretched textures. It’s a shame because it is so nearly working! I like texturing in sketchup because it’s nice and simple, in blender it’s over complicated. But unfortunately the UV maps that sketchup creates seem to overlap and Unreal doesn’t like that.

Just to be clear, concerning the texture UV’s, they are perfectly happy overlapping, it’s the ligthmap UV’s that cannot overlap. UE4 will attempt to make the lightmap UV islands non overlapping, but it’s not perfect, especially when the models are essentially unwelded (sketchUP donsn’t have the concept of welding).

I do a fair bit of developing in sketchup for X-Plane (Not UE4), and I use the program below to handle UV’s, it support 2 UV channels, so you can keep the UV’s you created in skechtup, and then unwrap the model in the 2nd channel to use for ligthmaps in unreal. It’s not free, but it works, supports tons for formats, and is very powerful.

http://www.unwrap3d.com/u3d/index.aspx

-Z