Hi! I’m about to start my archi-viz journey with unreal engine. I am fond of using sketchup and vray and I’m wondering if sketchup and unreal engine are great combinations. I have questions regarding the two:
Do I need to export everything (for example a fully detailed room with furniture and textures) as one from sketchup to unreal engine? Or should I export them one-by-one?
I was wondering if I can just build the furniture or download some components (if there are some for unreal engine), so I could create the whole scene there instead of building them in sketchup?
A bit of a heads up - the issue you’ll have is the UV mapping. Because you can’t create the extra channel that Unreal requires inside Sketchup, you will need Unreal to create them - it is not very good at this when compared to the likes of manually unwrapping your meshes in the likes of 3ds Max. This will mean a couple of things - you will either have overlapping UVs (meaning errors in how the meshes are represented) or you will need to break your meshes down into many, many small groups (the number of faces a mesh has determines this).
I model almost entirely inside SKP for simple mesh creation (walls, floors etc) then export to Max and unwrap there. I do not use the Unreal lightmap creation at all anymore, purely because it is a little unreliable and an unknown quantity. For complex meshes, such as furniture, SKP is a waste of time really. You don’t need to use 3ds Max though, there are free programs you can use which can do this, such as Blender, I believe.
If you jump on the asset store, you will see plenty of content you can purchase, such as furniture, which will work with little effort required on your behalf.
This may not make sense to you yet, so apologies if it is confusing - UV channels are a little tricky to get your head around to start with. I’m no established pro, but I was where you are now a few months ago, so figured I’d share what I know to save you some time/headaches.
Hey there, I also started my “3D-Stuff” with SketchUp and we both probably started with ue4 etc. the same time so High5!
(to be honest, I like the flexibility of SKP much more than ArchiCad or sth. SO I simply used hell of a lot SketchUp (+ LayOut) and Photoshop for my Bachelor in Architecture :D)
The thing with UV’s: If you really insist on working with SketchUp, there was/is a plugin from someone, where you can layout the UV’s (but it’s difficult and it’s maybe not even updated meh)
I really recommend to tryout blender. I mean it’s free and there are tons of tutorials (like ue4 hehe)
I start to wonder about the workflow from SKP to Max (or blender^^)
Or better: Is it much UV-work after importing to Max/Blender?
Cause currently, since buildings usually are straight walls and flat floors, I use 100% BSP-Brushes in UE4 for my Buildings
It’s fairly easy and you can change so much afterwards with GeometryEditing etc.
I don’t think it;s worth working with UV mapping inside Sketchup, regardless of extensions/plugins. There is a better UV mapping extension available, but it’s still in testing.
I’ve not used the BSP brushes yet - I am modelling existing buildings, so need to model off floor plans. I would have no idea how to be accurate with placing walls etc inside Unreal, it seems not well set up for that sort of thing?
The SKP to max workflow is simple. Import your SKP model, with everything grouped (I usually do individual walls, floors etc) and then use Steamroller script to quickly unwrap them all. The use the FBX exporter script to export individual meshes according to layer - so export walls, then slabs, the roofs etc etc.
Jeah the SketchUp-UV-things are kind of “WIP forever” I think (like I said, it’s 2 years ago that I’ve seen that and it was so complicated I didn’t even touch it).
Too bad, that the programmers don’t think about adding that feature in a simple way like SketchUp always is: simple & efficient
HMMM you might wanna give it a try with BSP! (If you have an existing plan, I would say it’s really easy, since you got the length and the height of anything)
Just make sure you got the GridSnap on (I recommend the “5 Snap-Step”) and you will see it’s simple as that.
From there on, you have many options on Brushes for Lightmaps / TextureSize & Rotation.
Not sure whether it’s a “better” solution for you and I don’t wanna say that, but maybe you should take a look =)
BTW I’m really interested about what you do there, maybe you can send me a PM how you got into that etc. hehe
greetz Lion
meh)
