Sketchup Datasmith Best Practices

aris777
Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:59:08 +0000
Platform & Builds

Hello everybody,
I work with large scale archviz projects and gradually I’m migrating from a skethup–> lumion to a sketchup–> unreal paradigm. I’ve solved most of the problems but I’m still struggling with the datasmith import method. I will explain with an example hoping that somebody can suggest a better method or you can tell me what I’m doing wrong.

In the example bellow, I have a minaret from a project in the middle east:

I export from sketchup with datasmith and import in unreal, but the problem is that it imports the whole hierarchy of the model and I end up with some 3000 entities for the building which makes everything slow:

I select all the buildings sub-entities and I merge them with merge actors:

after merging, I have a single mesh which is light for the scene but: I’m still left with all the “leftovers”(all the empty actors that correspond to sketchup’s groups and components) which I select and erase.
For this single building the whole process takes up to 5 mins and it’s only a small part of the scene.
I tried exploding everything in sketchup before exporting but it’s very problematic because sketchup merges geometry funily and the time I gain from unreal I lose it in sketchup.

Do you have an idea how I could optimize the whole process?
(maybe another importer or better settings?

4 posts - 3 participants