dealing with awful sketchup files.

[super gnu]

as is often the case i have a short deadline and a "helpfully" provided sketchup file to "make job easier"

its 70,000 individual objects, many with multisub materials on, 100+ materials, vast quantities of overlapping geometry - ( not just wall ends, whole sections of building which have several copies in same location) and 5-30 copies of each base material.


needless to say importing it has brought max to its knees.


given my deadline im just going to suck up the double faces and hope secondary ray bias will rescue me.


i do however need to attach the damn thing together, or i cant use max.


collapse dont work, it screws up the material assignments, and also appears to flip the faces of a ton of geometry. (why would it do that?)


convert to vray proxy seems to use collapse somewhere under the hood, as the results are the same.


attach is a maybe, maybe, but i get such massive multisub materials generated, i ended up with some elements with such high faceid's (65,534 for example) and despite showing correct shader in viewport, render with a different shader in vray.




i think before attaching i need to convert materials with same name to instances, scene wide, but ive not found a script that actually works.



so, how do other people deal with such disgusting files?






i

[Vizioen]

I use Quick Attach for attaching lots of objects: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/quick-attach you will need to reset your normals too because, well it's SketchUp, that script can do that too. It will generate multisubs indeed. But you can clean your Sketchup first with https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/c.../cleanup%C2%B3 and combine your materials with https://sketchucation.com/pluginstor...alconsolidator

[andybot_cg]

Definitely worth a little effort in Sketchup first. Start with going through in the file and deleting duplicates. If there are some large blocks that can go a long way. Sometimes grabbing only the pieces you need and copying and pasting into a new file can purge a bunch of junk. Then run the plugins mentioned above to clean up the geometry and duplicate materials.

[Dominic_Patel]

+1 for the cleanup plugin. Super useful, particularly on Sketchup files that have been made very quickly/messily. Doesn't always get rid of duplicates though so as Andy says its worth going through and manually deleting parts. I also copy and paste in place to new files and then import in parts so that I can quickly drop things on different layers in Max.

[glorybound]

I was fighting a Revit model. I had railings with flipped normals randomly across the railings. I was going one-by-one, flipping normals, and it would have taken me 1/2 day. I did a search, tried a few scripts, which nothing worked, and then I read a post about applying a normal modifier. BAM! I just added the modifier and everything fixed itself. I don't know... maybe it'll work somewhat for you SU model.

[piotrus3333]

I have one basic rule with sketchup files: as only sketchup can properly understand it's geometry I always export from sketchup to 3ds. never the other way around. delete what you do not need and export as single mesh. detach by mat ID in max if needed. in vray - secondary ray bias, vray2sidedMtl with back side zero opacity for backface culling.

[DanSHP]

We have started refusing Sketchup files. Revit/dwg only these days, its just too much faffing around. Life is so much easier.

Easy enough being in house with architects, as I can put my foot down (they will realise its for the best sooner or later!) Not so easy if you deal with external clients and models.

[super gnu]

hm, just seen all these replies now! thanks for the pointers guys.. looks like im going to have to get more into sketchup...

[flino2004]

-flip back faces
-export as 3ds format by material .( a lot meshes grouped by material)
-create your materials in max using the same name as they come from SU.
-create a library with those materials...if you need to re-import the model for any reason....only use update materials from library and done

[rusteberg]

Thanks for posting that clean up script - needed that!