Sketchup importer
There is currently no way to cleanly import models from SketchUp to Blender.
There is a Sketchup importer addon, but it no longer works in blender 4.4. It does nothing at all. github.com/RedHaloStudio/Sketchup_Importer/releases
And even before, it didn't work very well. It triangulated all models, and very often did not work, giving errors, etc. Previously, to get around the errors, you'd have to save the file as an older .skp version. That often helped. Now SketchUp has taken this feature out.
.dae - does not work well. The imported models are often broken, doubled up, no instancing. I tried fiddling with the export/import settings but never got a clean result. It's a mess.
.fbx - is not binary, so not supported in blender. For this to work, the user has to use the Autodesk .fbx converter to make it binary. The models import with applied transform and no instancing.
.obj - The models import with applied transforms and no instancing.
.3ds - The models import triangulated, with applied transforms and no instancing.
.stl - merges everything together, triangulates, no textures...
There seems to be no way currently to perfectly and easily import SketchUp files to Blender 4.4. There needs to be a solution.
11 Comments
Whats the difference between this fork and original importer?
You mean the importer in the link i shared? That one doesn't work. As explained in the post.
The addon you linked is a fork (a duplicate - and possibly modified) of another one. That's what we can see just below the repository title:
The original also seems to have released a new version for Blender 4.4, so
Perhaps what @zuorion's question actually means: why use this copy rather than the original?
And if an addon has issues, the first people you should bet in touch with are the addon's developers, not the BF.
The BF only provides Blender, it's not their job to provide bridges to other softwares, especially proprietary ones that are designed to be hard to work with unless their devs want it to.
Right-click select is not for BF only. Actually, the BF people rarely even read and participate here. This site is for any coder who wants to do anything for Blender.
You are right! I misinterpreted what zuorion wrote. The Original importer that now supports Blender 4.4, I did see it while googling for a solution, but it is for Mac OS only.
after importing just select all objects and goto edit mode and press X (delete) and then limited dissolve.
I agree that current version dont work in blender 4+, i think blender team will not look into it because sketchup is not animation related tool.
i am architect and i think blender team is not prioritizing archviz features, anyway you can use speckle (software) to exchange data between different architectural softwware including blender, sketchup, revit, 3ds max, tekla, etabs and many more....
I teach Archviz, Sketchup and Blender in a university. My students model a house in Sketchup and then make renders in blender. That's why I need this solved. :)
The best solution i could think of is this: .obj imports are really clean, except that all transforms are applied and there's no instancing. A blender script that would reconstruct instancing by recognising similar models would be a good enough solution.
this can be done in sketchup import not from blender because sketchup knows which objects are components.
Sketchup does not store instancing in exported .obj models.
i think we need to make script in sketchup to store this information. for now, you can just select all objects with same model and select last object with click then press Ctrl+L and select "Object data" to behave like components. Also, even when we press Alt+D to duplicate linked, the modifiers dont linked and sometimes we have to do this, for that there is an addon that use drivers to link them and behave like fully linked objects.