GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[bmw]

After reading the castle thread (mario 64) in here, I downloaded google sketchup.

But does anybody here actually have the professional version? I see that the professional version supports exporting as .obj, and the google sketchup warehouse has tons of buildings and cities that could possibly be exported to .obj files and imported into GE.

Wouldn't a Frigate v2.0 be pretty cool?

(I took this screenshot from a model I downloaded and loaded into sketchup)

[Kode-Z]

bmw wrote:

Wouldn't a Frigate v2.0 be pretty cool?

You bet!

It would be awesome, seeing that Frigate was the only mission that wasn't on land (I suppose Cradle was in the air!).

[radorn]

there's no "pro" version, but rather these features appear after registering the program... you know what I mean.

Anyway, you should be very careful when building things if you plan to export anything or things will get messy. You should make sure you don't leave vertices arround, you texture the right faces, and they are oriented correctly. That's the problem in sketchup... well, it's not a problem for sketchup, but if you plan to get things out of sketchup... it may actually become a problem. I'm starting to wonder if it is a good idea at all to use this program. maybe the exporter is not very good at all. I have yet to get real good results with that, so I may have to get some more "profesional" stuff to make the final touches to what I model here.

also, don't rely much on using other people's models as a base, because they are rather messy and will usually require so much work to be aconditioned that it will probably be less work to make them yourself.
It's the nature of the program... it's made for sketching things up and that's what most people use it for. I'm just... strange, and use it differently than how it is intended to be used.

[r.e.l. 237]

YES people we are in business, you CAN in fact create ur models and export them to obj, GE ready.... oh this is too good to be true

well i have tested a simple room i made but obviously there are some thing i gotta know that i dont so the model will convert right, but its a possibility

by the way i have sketchup pro. for some reason i created a room with textures on all 12 faces (6 interior, 6 exterior), but when i export to obj it only exports the textures used on the outer 6 faces... why could this be?

[bmw]

Try converting any one of the many room models available at google's sketchup warehouse and let us know how that goes.

[radorn]

well, I don't know much about important details of how 3d works at the low level, like how 2 sided faces are treated internally in different environments, like other more profesional softwares or hardware rendering, nor much less goldenye.
I know sketchup uses 2 sided polys, but don't know how other programs interpret them or how it treats them when exporting to other formats, such as OBJ.
Tip: you should be very careful with it because many times it orients faces the opposite way you want them to be, so you should be extra vigilant with that, it doesn't matter much within sketchup, but it should matter when exporting and using in GE. You have "reverse faces" in the right button contextual menu, and also "orient faces", which attempts to orient them according to the orientation of the selected poly, but don't trust it very much, double check what's it done after using it.

bmw:

As I said earlier, you should not be very confident of other sketchupers work when it comes to "critical" environments like this, because they are full of "informalities", like overlayed faces with 0 separation, holes, many intersected planes, and also tend to be very highly detailed so not very apropriate for GE, also, they don't consider it very important to follow "real" measures, even though you can be very precise with sketchup.
I once downloaded an atx motherboard model that was bigger than a football stadium xD. it was otherwise a very simplistic and little worked on model, which relied on a high resolution photograph of the real thing for all the detail. slots didnt even have a slot.
Most important, they are normally not very clean desings, there's a lot of garbage left out that goes unnoticed unless you dig it out. Not much of a problem for what they are intended, but not very good for GE.

Also, for now, all my tries to export things became a bit messy, I may post screenshots to show what I'm talking about. One very strange thing that happenned to me was that the handrail and one of the brick textures got duplicated, but not just with an identical one; they got duplicated with a deformed and seemingly corrupted one, which was applied to some of the surfaces that formerly got the correct one. I can't imagine why it does that. I tried to see if there was any difference at all in how they are applied, but apparently not. I may have to take the burden into me and retexture those and hope it corrects the problem now.

That's another issue with sketchup that I can't seem to decipher, sometimes something goes wrong and you have no clue why but it forces you to delete that part and redo it, and hope it goes well this time.

I'm starting to confirm my fears that I won't be able to just leave all to sketchup, and will have to give the final touches in another "more serious" suite.

It's a good tool, and the only I have worked in for now, but it's a bit whimsical sometimes. I gues it's just not intended to be as serious as one might need, which is a pity because it has many very powerful features that, so I have heard, are missing in other more serious CAD software.

[r.e.l. 237]

hmm im confused, one rectangle in sketchup has two faces.. if you apply a material to one face, when exporting, it will act as if the face its exporting is the one without a material... don't know if you understand but i guess if YOU can't export it right and you know how to use it then it must be really hard to do

[radorn]

you should make sure you are texturing the right face, and fiddle with the exporter options, but anyway, I'm starting to think the exports are buggy/broken in sketchup.

I think I cant recommend it to anyone for this. I may need to continue work in another environment, and correct what sketchup decides to mess up in te process.

Maybe if I can find some cad program that imports sketchup models rather than havin sketchup export to other formats...

I'm at loss.

[r.e.l. 237]

3ds max?

[radorn]

perhaps, I have no experience or much knowledge, I don't know what's better or more fit for me. I started doing 3d stuff arround september last year, with sketchup, which I found quite by chance. I was curious as to how many stuff google had aglutinated so far, and found it. It seemed nice so I tried, and that's it.
I don't really think I have learned much from it, because, as with most stuff I do, I only use my brains as a resource to find my way arround. For example, for what I'm doing with mario castle, I didn't use anything revolutionary or specially technical. I just observed that the dimensions of almost every texture and edge followed some proportionality. Like, doors, which are always 2'5x1'5x0,3 and door holes have 1 of depth. I was always good for spatial thinking, so all I had to learn was how to trasladate that to the 3d space in sketchup, which was not too hard, so I soon was able to do something like I'm doing, but I'm always lacking a lot of knowledge I would like to have because... well, I think I'm not going to enter that...

Anyway, I have downloaded a trial of 3ds max (900 mega, whoa), so let's see how that goes.