SketchUp+BlendUp -> Blender -> Indigo

Juju · Post by **Juju** » Mon Jun 29, 2015 7:18 pm

I'm a SketchUp user, I'm aware of Blender but so far it has been no more than a passing interest.

On Friday, I noticed an exporter from SketchUp to Blender that seems to fix all the things that normally go wrong (or requires some additional work) when exporting to Blender.

https://cgcookiemarkets.com/blender/all ... converter/

I'm interested in what Blender has to offer, as an extension of workflow possibly. I was wondering if there is any commonality between how IES ligts are associated to objects in Blender / Blendigo and how it is done in Sketchup / Skindigo?

Headroom · Post by **Headroom** » Tue Jun 30, 2015 12:17 am

In Sketchup/SkIndigo as well as in Blender/BlendiGo IES lights are in the Material panel.

In Blender you have to check "Material Emission" and "IES Profile" to do the same.

Juju · Post by **Juju** » Tue Jun 30, 2015 12:23 am

Apologies if I'm unclear.

What I'm after is to find out is if the IES information / profile is saved in the SketchUp file (on a component basis), the same in the case of Blendigo. Then if there is any way the info could then (possibly) be exported without further interaction / work needed, in the case of the exporter mentioned in OP.

Headroom · Post by **Headroom** » Thu Jul 02, 2015 11:26 am

You can try if that works because as I understand it there is an LT version of said exporter. For the purpose of determining this specific functionality you would not need the full version.

Having this said, I am doubtful that that the BlendUp exporter can do this.
A. The way that an IES light source is assigned to geometry is through Skindigo, which appends data to the Sketchup model. How would BlendUp know about this extended data structure ?

B. once exported t the problem is the same. BlendUp would, need to restructure this data to match the structure requirements of Blendigo, the Indigo exporter for Blender.

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Juju · Post by **Juju** » Thu Jul 02, 2015 7:19 pm

I sent the developer an e-mail, pointing to this thread as well, hopefully they'll be able to find a solution?

Headroom · Post by **Headroom** » Fri Jul 03, 2015 5:54 am

What I would encourage you to try is to model your geometry in Sketchup and apply Sketcuhup materials.
Then export to Blender and do the rest in Blender.

If BlendUp exports the Sketchup materials correctly into Blender then the textures applied to gemoetry in SV should be avalable in Blender with the correct UV mapping (hopefully).

Creating and applying indigo materials in Blender is easy or at least not any more difficult than it is in Sketchup including IES profiles.

If you get your models exported properly you've bypassed one of the areas I could imagine to be the biggest hurdle for a Sketchup user. Modeling in Blender is very different from SketchUp

BlendUp · Post by **BlendUp** » Thu Jul 16, 2015 1:54 am

Hi Juju,

I am Laurent, BlendUp developer.

I have studied your examples and Headroom is right. I cant' make it at my level as I don't have access to the data structure logic used by SkIndigo and Blendigo.

BlendUp gives you correct polygons and uv mapping so you should be able to use Blendigo for your needs.

If there is some compatibility issue with Blendigo, let me know so that we can see what can be done!