Zeldaboy14
Owner of ZPW.
Yay! Another Sketchup User! Anyway, good job with the Grain Bin thing.
Would SketchUp Make (Google) work for Trainz?
- Thread starter Chris750
- Start date
Anything good takes time to learn, it may be quick but the results will likely be garbage for TRS use. I personally do not download any sketchup content because so many of them have absurdly high poly counts and a huge amount of texture files since you cannot UV unwrap. Couple that with no normal mapping or AO baking and the results will rarely look good in Trainz.
In some areas its fairly intuitive - in others its a right nightmare loljohnwhelan
Well-known member
The Richardson Pioneer grain elevator done in Sketchup. Total work time 70 minutes with no tutorials as compared to over 12 hours for Blender with tutorials. Obviously this is still rough and more to be done, but I am happy with it.
The basic overhead is 300 poly equivalents per mesh and 200 per texture the building itself looks like about 140 polys Blender could be a little lower than this, but it would be interesting to see what the poly count in Pev's mesh viewer would be. So if its a single texture then a simple sketchup model of 140 polys isn't bad compared with the overheads. If it uses multiple texture files then its going to be one of the assets that kill lap top performance.
So what does it come up with in Pev's mesh viewer?
Thanks John
Always good to see new creators, but disappointed that the time you've put in to learn Blender is going to be wasted. Sketchup has it's uses, but it will never be great for Trainz models because of a) poly count and b) materials. If you can get to where you've got to with Blender then the next steps- uv unwrapping and materials- will almost certainly be easier in Blender than Sketchup. I did post a thread a while back about starting a model in Sketchup and finishing it in Blender, but it fell on deaf ears- http://forums.auran.com/trainz/show...er-Trainz-workflow&highlight=Blender+Sketchup. Might be something of use to somebody in there.
R3
R3
SU could be used as a model creator and then the mesh could be imported into Blender for proper UV mapping and export. This would get around the problem of multiple textures with SU models and with Blender the mesh could be optimized if necessary before output.
Having said this any model building program could be used including Daz Studio's Hexagon for that matter to produce the underlying mesh before processing.
Having said this any model building program could be used including Daz Studio's Hexagon for that matter to produce the underlying mesh before processing.
The Richardson Pioneer grain elevator done in Blender. Total work time 15 minutes with no tutorials, 67 polys.
Paul
johnwhelan
Well-known member
There is a problem with Sketchup where two parts intersect. It creates additional polys so for example in the silo where the center loading door intercepts the roof it creates three sections of roof not one and that's not so easy to replace in Blender or 3DS.
Cheerio John
Actually although you keep saying that it's not necessarily true. That is the default behavior but that can be changed and you can also remove hidden polys in Sketchup so you could do this building with 67 polys if you know what you are doing.
Paul
True enough...
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johnwhelan
Well-known member
Agreed now I wonder what the OP managed to do as a poly count in Sketchup. Basically in Blender I'd just take a cube, untick the double side, duplicate it (<shift>D)two top corners together to form the roof then n if need be to type in the dimensions you'd probably want to join all the boxes and roofs at the end then into Edit mode and merge a few vertices, delete bottom facing faces since you don't need them and do a boolean for the doorway. I wonder why you'd need 12 hours of studying tutorials to do it. It's practically the moving house tutorial in the wiki book but just clone the basic house cube and roof and redimension them.
I look forward to your next steam loco made in Sketchup now we know the poly count can be beaten down by avoiding the defaults. Are we going to be treated to a tutorial on how to build a steam engine in Sketchup by the way?
Thanks John
Zeldaboy14
Owner of ZPW.
Did someone say "Sketchup to Blender to Trainz Tutorial? Never fear, TomixNscale89 has already done it! Here is the video!
Zeldaboy14
Owner of ZPW.
It's not that bad Tomix! If it helped me, then it should help other's!
Hm...I understand now and I had seen this one in my one and only foray into SU. This is due to the B-spline mesh versus a ploy mesh. In a B-spline there is no way of connecting perpendicular meshes in the same fashion - think of putting two pieces of cloth next to each other perpendicularly.
John
3dMax - 36 polys - about 30 mins but not rushing. I think the big difference here would be that I created each portion of the building separately then attached them. The only polys I removed were the bottom polys and the back of the 2 smaller boxes. I left the main wall of the large box complete with no alteration to it. Had I cut that out as well the the poly count would have gone up a little but certainly not as high as the 140 poly count of SU.
grain building by av.wright, on Flickr
johnwhelan
Well-known member
3dMax - 36 polys - about 30 mins but not rushing. I think the big difference here would be that I created each portion of the building separately then attached them. The only polys I removed were the bottom polys and the back of the 2 smaller boxes. I left the main wall of the large box complete with no alteration to it. Had I cut that out as well the the poly count would have gone up a little but certainly not as high as the 140 poly count of SU.
grain building by av.wright, on Flickr
The 140 poly count was my estimate of what could be done not what had been done in Sketchup.
Cheerio John