How To Import Sketchup File Into 3ds Max 2009

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It's not SketchUp. You can get the same thing happening when you view certain files (the vast minority) in something like Deep Exploration. I assume it's the way that certain modellers assemble their work; as it appears to be some kind of mismatch between the internal axes of individual groups and components and the world axes/origin. For instance, certain vehicles import into other applications with all 4 wheels superimposed upon each other. I'm not sure what the solution would be other than maybe somehow resetting all the axes in Max before export.

Problems importing 3ds files from max to sketchup. Then Export Selected and when you import your.3ds file into SketchUp everything should now be in the right. SketchUp Your Way Into 3ds Max. Since 2009 He has helped the 3dsmax team. It is very important to clean up your SketchUp file prior to importing into. Importing and Exporting CAD Files. Before you import a CAD file into SketchUp Pro, it’s helpful to know what CAD elements SketchUp Pro can and can’t import.

Yes, it's got to be something like that. Of course the easy way to solve the problem would be to reduce everything to raw geometry, before export.which would kind of level the playing field. OK, so you'd need to regroup everything once in SU; but TBH you ought to do that anyway if you're a SU modeller worthy of the name. For instance, in the original lamp that is posted, two out of the three support arms ought to be deleted anyway and the remaining one made into a component, ready to be duplicated around the reflector. That's the way you'd do it if you were building it from scratch. Hi everyone, I am running into the same problem with some furniture models from the web. In Max it is obvious that the groups all have different position of axis.

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Could someone point me to the right direction what exactly to do in Max to fix all axis at once? Pete, what did you mean by 'dragging a selection block'?

After searching the web quite a bit and messing with pivots I'm still clueless. I used only SketchUp in the recent years, my little Max knowledge seems to have disappeared completely, please help me out. Thanks Alxndr. Mvollrath wrote:I realize this is an old post but I figured out a work around to this issue and wanted to share if people are still encountering this problem. In Max select all the objects you want to export, go to Utilities Reset Xform Reset Transform Reset Selected Then Export Selected and when you import your.3ds file into SketchUp everything should now be in the right place. I hope this helps!

Thank you very much mvollrath, it is solve my Problem. Usually i use Hierarchy and reset pivot, but no effect.

I constantly hear people say, “Sketch-Up to 3DS Max doesn’t work.” This statement just isn’t true. In fact, this is the process our company uses for 3D modeling and rendering, and it’s a very efficient, clean process on a number of levels.

If you want to see some rendering that were modeled in Sketch-Up,. They were all modeled in Sketch-Up. I will go through the nuances of how to do this, and hopefully I can convert some of you to sketch-up modeling. Before I begin, here are some reasons the sketch-up to max process is effective:. Modeling in Sketch-Up is darn fast. I don’t care how fast of a 3D Max modeler you are, anyone who knows sketch-up well will beat you every time!. Sketch-Up keeps the mesh very clean.

You can push and pull walls all day long, and your mesh is exactly what you see. The geometry is super light.

Materials transfer from Sketch-Up to Max. There’s no need to reapply materials after importing your geometry. There are great tools (paint bucket + shift / ctrl / alt) for coloring geometry that saves plenty of time and is much faster than changing ID’s or shaders. I could go on, but look into Sketch-Up.

Before you purchase the Pro version, you can download the free version and try it out. The free version has everything the Pro version has, except for the export options (which you will need if you decide you like this method). Alright enough of the sales pitch, let’s jump into the process.

It really all starts with sketch-up and understanding how the materials work. When you create geometry in Sketch-Up, it has a default material. You will notice that the default material is white on one side and purple on the other side. This material is showing the direction of the normals, so white should be the front and purple should be the back. This is very important. When you import your model into max, only the white sides will render.

So as you model be sure the faces are white. To get your faces in the right direction, select the face, then right click and select reverse face. If you have the default material on the geometry, you will notice the purple will change to white and vise versa. Now that your model is done, let’s take a look at materials.

Because our faces are all in the right direction we won’t worry about coloring purple faces (face in the wrong direction). Coloring is as simple as clicking on your faces. When you name a material, be sure it describes the type of material and not what color it iswe can see that it’s red!

Also keep the names short. Max will truncate the names, so be sure you can tell what it is with just a few letters. Psp firmware 3.30 download.

Here are some useful Sketch-Up coloring tips/shortcuts: Paint bucket + CTRL (colors all of the faces with the same current material touching each other) Paint bucket + SHFT (colors all of the faces with the current material in that current group with the new material) After coloring your model, you can always go back to view the normals by changing the face style of the model. This is helpful when a Sketch-Up model is already textured, but you want to flip the faces. Note, you will have to re-apply the material to the newly flipped face.

Now that our scene is modeled and colored let’s talk about exporting. With Sketch-Up Pro, you can export as various formats (3ds, dwg, vrml, obj, etc). I typically export as.3ds format. Before you hit export, let’s look at the options button. Every export format will have different options, but I will only discuss the options for the.3ds format. You can change Export to 4 different types: Full hierarchy, By layer, By material, Single object.

The only two that I recommend using are “By material”, and “Single object.” And of those two, I prefer “Single object”. If you export with “By material” sketch-up will break your model into different meshes according to their material. So you may have one object in Sketch-Up, but when you import the.3ds into Max, there will be a mesh for every material.

This doesn’t just make a mesh for each material, but it creates a mesh for each material being surrounded by another material, so even though you only have one brick material, for example, you may have several meshes with that same material. The advantage of this method is that you have one shader for each material. So it keeps your materials simple. The disadvantage is that it may take longer to export to.3ds, and in Max your viewport may be a little sluggish if your scene is large and complex. If you export with “Single object” Sketch-Up will export your entire scene as one mesh, and with that one mesh it will create a multi / sub-object material with a shader for each material from Sketch-Up. Because there is a limitation in the.3ds format that meshes can only have 65,536 vertices and faces, if this limit is exceeded, more than one mesh will be created with the emphasis on keeping the number of meshes to the minimum amount necessary.

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Here’s where this one gets a little complex though. Because every mesh has its own sub/object material, you may have some sub shaders that have the same material. A good trick is to clean these up by making them instances of each other, before you start tweeking them. The advantage of this method is that the scene no matter how much geometry there is, is incredibly fast and efficient. This, as I already said, is the method that I prefer. The disadvantage is that it does take some time to go through the mulit / sub-object materials to make sure that there is only one copy of each material, and the rest are all instances. These are the only export functions I will cover now, but the image on the left are the settings that I usually use.

Now let’s talk briefly on importing the.3ds file into Max. Use File- Import.

It will first ask you if you want to Merge with the current scene, or replace the current scene. I always merge with the current scene. I also always uncheck Convert units (I do all of my Sketch-Up modeling in feet and inches). This will keep the real-world scale. It will also ask you if you want to change the animation length. I always say no.

How To Import Sketchup File Into 3ds Max 2009How To Import Sketchup File Into 3ds Max 2009

Now your Sketch-Up model should be nice and tidy in Max. I think it’s important to state this even though to many max users this may be obvious: Just because your material editor is empty does not mean there aren’t any materials in your scene. There is no correlation. The material editor is just a holding place to tweek your materials. If you open the material map browser, this window will show you what you have in your scene, and you can add that to the material editor. You will notice on the image on the left that there is one multi / sub-object shader, that contains the 4 materials that we created in Sketch-Up.

So there is no need to apply the materialsthey’re already applied! I usually use Arch&Design materials, and I always add a UVW map modifier to my meshes. I use Real-World Map Size, and adjust the scale of my maps in the shaders accordingly.

I know this was very exhaustive, and sounds complex, but the process is truly quick and simple once the understanding sinks in. I hope that now you all know that you can model in Sketch-Up and imported beautifully into Max. Stick a fork in me, I’m done! I have a little something to add here. I truly agree with your statement that modeling in Sketchup is a breeze and much much quicker, cleaner, & easier, and I have been a MAX user of past 6 releases (Max 6 - MxDs 2009). Max simply cannot compare to the ease of creating, NAVIGATING & then EDITING models. There is no question about it.

My submission is, WHY EVER D'YOU WANT TO GO TO MAX FOR RENDERING? Have you tried V-Ray f/SU? It supports almost nearly all features of VRfMax (except for the few esoteric ones which one normally doesn't use in everyday rendering unless he/she works for George Lucas) The best approach I follow is: Model in SU, get Arch+Des materials/shaders from Max (ASGVIS.com has a Vismat converter plugin that makes Sketchup materials from MAX V-Ray ones). & Then render in Sketchup itself.

I have found SU ACTUALLY RENDERS medium size scenes FASTER THAN MAX!! Yes, its true!(but no more than 10000 polygons - equivalent to decent interior scenes @ our office) So my advise would be to go to MAx only to get some of those 'fantastic' Arch+Design materials, and then come back to SU for rendering in V-Ray for Sketchup. Cheers Macho. Macho, thanks for the comment.

I somewhat agree with this comment, and I have used the v-ray plug-in for sketch-up. It's very impressive, but limited. Lights can only be controlled so much dealing with ies files and attenuation. If you wanted to render AO passes, or z-depth passes, then you're out of luck, and if you really wanted to animate something (secondary animation), then you have no choice but to go to max to do these things. I agree though, I was surprised to find how fast v-ray in sketch-up is!

If the modeling power of sketch-up could be combined with the rendering power of max, that would be the ultimate program in my opinion. Anonymous Thanks, this info has been really helpful. I'm trying to take a quite complex timber frame house model into Max and create an animation of the frame coming together and then the cladding moving in from the sides to complete the building.

Do you have any idea how to export from Sketchup so I can retain the 'groups' I have created? For example I have a load of timber floor joists that I want to keep as one group so that I can easily move these when compiling the animation. Thanks, Paul Nagel. Anonymous I just learnt how to use 3dmax, we were taught all the basics of modeling in a crash course and using mentalray/lighting for a peice of coursework due in for a digital architecture module. When it came to modeling though the whole selection process seamed slugish and i spent two weeks producing a pretty terrible architectural model for a piece of coursework for two weeks time. So i decided to create it in sketchup, took 2 days to model the whole thing in precise detail which is something i just couldn't get my head around in max, and i'm using max to render after i export it.

Although i've been exporting it as a dwg file with each material i want to render being on a different layer. I.e glass, Floor plates,Carpets. Max is brilliant for rendering when the mental ray is used and partically in animation it comes into its own.

But the modeling and selection interface is horribly slow. Thankyou for the article and the modeling tech, i'll use it for anything done in the future. Anonymous 'Now that our scene is modelled and coloured.' How did you convince the red colour to turn into brick? '.that contains the 4 materials that we created in Sketch-Up.' I see them - but how did they get there?

When I follow your tutorial and export as instructed, the material browser is empty, the textures are confused and projected in the wrong direction, or missing. I hope you've missed a few steps! The only thing you've told me is how to export, and to make sure that the normals face the correct way. For your first question, when I assigned the red color in sketch-up, it is just a placeholder for what I later changed to a red brick.

For your second question, when you import the geometry, it also imports the multi/sub-object material. Even though you can't see it in the material editor, it is still in the scene. Use the eyedropper button in the material editor and select your geometry to pull it up in one of the slots. When the mesh is first imported the materials in max are just colors from the materials in sketch-up. I changed each material to create the texture I wanted in max.

Hope that cleared some things up for you. Anonymous My SketchUp users always tell me of the people on blogs and forums not knowing of our SketchUp 3D conversion system, so let me make it more publicly known. For the last 15 years we have provided all the defacto and most complete implementations of all key file formats for high-end production 3ds Max users.

We created the first set of independent, fully implemented SketchUp bidirectional converters. They are the most refined and well developed to date: When combined with PolyTrans-for-Max (you will get native SketchUp 3ds Max, including support for texturing, hierarchy/components, materials, etc.

Ditto for supporting SketchUp to/from Maya, Lightwave, XSI, Cinema-4D, Collada, FBX and all other formats and 3D programs. Anonymous hi ramy! First of all i would like to thank you for your wonderful work. Im a sketchup/3dsmax user and you enlightened me with things i cant do.

But i do have a question though. You said that you applied a UVW mapping in ur messhes.i did exactly what your example said. But there seem to have a problem with my model. I applied the uvw map in the whole model and the top part of the cubes(brick) where not properly positioned. Do i have to apply uvw map on all the mesh and not on the group?

Sasa thank you ramy for yours share knowledge. I am vray user, but maybe you can help me. I always put two faces for glass (one extruded face, exactly parallelepiped) In sketch Up, and I want to know how to orient mesh side, I wants to use import model for exterior and enterior rendering, and Is that made some different, I always export models with two sided materials settings checked.

I did some work right now, and I got some strange reflections on my glass elements. Than I try to fix it, and put reflections to 0 percent in my material slot, but it stil doesnt work fine, Maybe my glass material isnt good enought. Maybe you know how to fix that and if you can help me to find good glass material. Thanks in advance. HI RAMY, I WAS WONDERING IF YOU WOULB BE ABLE TO HELP ME, IM DOING ARCHITECTURE HERE IN AUSTRALIA AND I WAS HAVING A LOOK THROUGH YOUR BLOG AND I MUST SAY YOU HAVE ALOT OF GOOD WORK ON HERE, SO I WAS THINKING IF YOU USED 3DSMAX TO EXPORT TO CRYSIS GAME ENGINE AS IN DOING A REAL TIME INTERACTIVE ANIMATION BUT THE PROBLEM IM FACING WITH 3DSMAX THAT I HAVE OVER 200,000 POLYS IN MY MODEL IS THERE ANY WAY TO EITHER REDUCE THE POLYS OR SPLIT THE MODEL UP IN PIECES TO EXPORT BECAUSE CRYSIS WONT ALLOW ANYTHING ABOVE 10,000. THANKS FOR YOUR TIME AND CONSIDERATION.

How To Import Sketchup File To 3ds Max

Aaron a couple of suggestions: 1. I think I've seen this before.

Not sure how much geometry is in your scene, but if your artist is finding split faces on meshes, they can select all of the vertices and use the weld tool in the modifier tab to connect your faces. If you're using Max 2010 or newer you can import.skp files straight from Max without doing an export from SU. The advantage is that mesh vertices will be welded (I think). But what is even better is that it imports UV's from SU. So if you have rough materials as blocking in SU, when you import it will also import UV scale and direction on your mesh. Hope that helps. Hi Ramy I am running 3ds max 2012 and am fairly inexpierenced.

I have drawm my model in sketch up, followed your steps, and exported the model. When opening in max the objects are split seperatley with the correct materials applied, perfect. I open the slate material editor, hit material along the top and hit 'get all scence materials', perfect.

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However this is where I get stuck, and its really holding me up. It is my understanding that one should use MR materials where possible, as in Arch and Design, to produde the best render. All I can imagine doing here is changing the materials I have already applied in skectup to have a map of somesort, is there no way of making these MR materials? As in fresh materials? I am really sorry but I get really stuck at this point, but it is really holding me up. I just know how important it is get the materials right. From this point I know how to apply a daylight system, lights and set up the render, but all the time I do this at the momment it just looks really basic as the materials are weak.

I'm so close to giving up and trying Vray but with the new Iray in max I really want to get this to work where I have a realativley realistic image at the end. Thanks Ramy, P.S I still do not know what a shader is or sub ojects so please keep it basic. Also if you could suggest any other posts that might help me achieve a good external daytime render I would be most grateful. My field is architecture. I have not created any new geometry in 3ds. After importing the the sketch up model, I begin replacing and editing the arch & design materials, however as mentioned the materials have no texture, just a shade.

One thing I have noticed is that in material slate, the image of the material map has a texture, but the primary material it connects to does not have any texture, this leads me to think it is a setting within the material it self? I will attempt the UVW modifier and let you know how I get on. Thank you for the advice. Thanks for your help. I have been running tests all evening and what I think I have worked out is that adding textures in sketchup makes no difference, but what I have discovered is that in 3ds max, when changing the material to an 'autodesk material libary' material, the render and viewport do not texture but instead create a shade, however the mental ray 'Arch & Design' and mental ray 'Autodesk' all seem to work ok.

I read somewhere that for the best results you should aim to always create Arch & Design materials, so hopefully this will push me in a better direction. Thanks again whilst the mental ray Arch adding textures in sketchup is not needed, where I was going wrong was that. Hi Ramy I still havent overcome the no texture problem, despite what I said earlier I still have the problem with arch and design materials. I find the only way around the problem is to apply a UVW modifeier to the object which is fine however it changes the real world scale of the map, why is this? I dont mind apply UVW mods. To all the objects but it would be great to get to the route of the problem, and it seems it is just creating me new problems with map scales. I could send you my skecthup and 3ds models if you were interested?

Tnx for the info. I have a question regarding glass. It is very important, PLEAE HELP ME. I ppsted it on cgarchitect forum, here's the link: Another thing: does importing su directly or exporting to 3ds retain the model's layer?

In my office, we use layers because we are constantly updating our projects, so we only import the layers we want. BTW, wouldn't it be great if there was a script that locked max's materials and modifiers to layers so that we could import updated parts and don't have to reassign materials and modifiers all the time?

Do you think that exists or someone could write it? Well I was surprised that you said anyone know sketch up will beat whoever modeling his stuff in 3dmax,wow.that is absolutely wrong statement dude, 3d studio max tools and technology cannot be beating by sketch up in anyway.if two pro ppl working on same project I guaranty that the one working on 3d max can beat whoever working on sketch up file fast and easy,if you are a mechanic not matter how you are good if you dont have the right tools dud you screwed.3d max tools is a way better and easy to use for Pro.