Plant Factory Trees

[kenancakir]

Hi, I want tı use Plant Factory trees in Sketchup-Vray. I don't have enough knowledge about exporting meshes from PF, there is no sketchup presets in settings, so, i choose 3DMax in options. When i import obj or fbx into sketchup using universal importer plugin, it comes nicely. But file pathing is incorrect, i see missing file icon in diffuse slot. When i want to repath, it says there is no match files, but all maps are there. I correct paths one by one, but UV disappears. I leave it as it is and apply all maps and it works fine. Can you guide us the correct way to get PF trees in sketchup? Thank you..

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi kenancakir,

You have a couple of options here.

Option 1

• Export the tree as OBJ
• Import in SU using the universal importer
• Convert the tree materials to V-Ray materials
• Use the V-Ray File Path Editor to Archive & Repath the textures. This will convert the textures from bitmap buffers saved in the .skp file to image files on disk while preserving the UVs.

Option 2

• Export Alembic (.abc)
• Load the .abc file in a V-Ray Proxy Mesh loader
• Manually re-create the materials using the texture maps exported from Plant Factory. Note that all texture's should use a placement UV Channel 0 (instead of the deafault 1)
• Assign the materials to the Proxy

Option 2 preserves the geometry normals and gives you a proxy to work with.
However the manual material setup is not ideal.
Keep in mind that even if you import the materials, you'll still have to manually apply the normal maps.

Hope that helps,
Konstantin

[kenancakir]

Thank you, very helpful.