Tutorial - Objects for BTB with Sketchup

[Biggles1212]

Hi I've completed a full tutorial that should be comprehensive enough for just about anyone to make objects in Sketchup and use them in BTB for their favorite sim.

I'd appreciate any good suggestions.

It took me a few hours to work all the snags out and there was a lot of great information already here at Race Department.

I've uploaded the tutorial here.

http://forum.racedepartment.com/downloads/btb-library/38/full-objects-sketchup-btb-1805/

If you have any questions post them here or PM me. I'll do my best but I'm no guru at this.

Do enjoy. Thanks

 

[martinez]

Sorry for my English It should be rather "better performance in all simulations" LOL.
Forgive me that i don't have time to make a tutorial...

But - say you want to model a house and have 2 textures for walls and one for roof. Instead of using three textures, you can place all of the pictures on one texture (and this is called "texture atlas") and attach this to model. In Sketchup you have to select some polygon, right click it and choose "Texture - position". Then you map the polygon. You can easily find videos on this on YouTube. This way you have to map all of the polygons of your model (there are a little more sophisticated ways also, but for simple model this works enough).
There is more - you can have texture atlas with pictures of another objects and use it for more models! This way you can have just one material for multiple models This will help to the performance a lot!

The most important thing you have to do in xpacker after importing your objects (which all use the same texture) is to merge all their materials into one. XPacker always creates new material with new object imported.
The trick is that you import your models (couple materials appear in xpacker), then (or before, does not matter) you create new material (click "Add from textures") and assign this material to all objects. This way they all will use the same. If everything goes right, at the end you can delete unused materials and textures (all textures will be the same, but in different folders) to make the xpack smaller.

Tip - to assign material to objects in XPacker, copy (Ctrl+C) the path of this material, select object, go to it's material path and paste (Ctrl+V - there's no right click). The material will be replaced. You have to do this for all objects one by one. Takes a little time, but this is the only acceptable way to make good xpack

I hope it helps

PS. Don't forget to save the Material.

 

[moeom]

Sorry for my English It should be rather "better performance in all simulations" LOL.
Forgive me that i don't have time to make a tutorial...

But - say you want to model a house and have 2 textures for walls and one for roof. Instead of using three textures, you can place all of the pictures on one texture (and this is called "texture atlas") and attach this to model. In Sketchup you have to select some polygon, right click it and choose "Texture - position". Then you map the polygon. You can easily find videos on this on YouTube. This way you have to map all of the polygons of your model (there are a little more sophisticated ways also, but for simple model this works enough).
There is more - you can have texture atlas with pictures of another objects and use it for more models! This way you can have just one material for multiple models This will help to the performance a lot!

The most important thing you have to do in xpacker after importing your objects (which all use the same texture) is to merge all their materials into one. XPacker always creates new material with new object imported.
The trick is that you import your models (couple materials appear in xpacker), then (or before, does not matter) you create new material (click "Add from textures") and assign this material to all objects. This way they all will use the same. If everything goes right, at the end you can delete unused materials and textures (all textures will be the same, but in different folders) to make the xpack smaller.

Tip - to assign material to objects in XPacker, copy (Ctrl+C) the path of this material, select object, go to it's material path and paste (Ctrl+V - there's no right click). The material will be replaced. You have to do this for all objects one by one. Takes a little time, but this is the only acceptable way to make good xpack

I hope it helps

THANK YOU! I understood what you said and i will put it to good use when i get the time later today or tomorrow. Have already created an XPack with the textures i would want to use for the moment. Grass, Sand and Water. There are 6 textures in all. After reading a few threads, i realized its best just to put all necessary textures in one XPack to make folders smaller. No wonder why my first test track was a whopping 80 mb!!! Now i understand why. Thanks a lot again.

 

[Noel Romero]

I'm having problems creating trees using Sketchup. I use TGA files to create the transparent parts of the trees. They import well into xpacker and when in-game, they have the transparency correct, but if there is another transparent object (say another tree) behind it, the tree behind it shows up. I already tried chaning the textures to DDS and then changing the DAE file references manually to the dds texture, but it still has the same issue. I will try to screencap this when I get home.

 

[martinez]

I always used non-transparent jpg's for objects in Sketchup. Some people had problems also with png's. I even didn't know that Sketchup can load TGA I created trees as simple as possible, knowing nothing about collada code and I let XPacker do the job - collada loaded jpg's as textures for materials and after this I replaced jpg's by dds's (but for materials in XPacker) and set Use Chroma (or Use Alpha, but many people say that Chroma needs less calculations in games)... Never had any problem this way.
For transparent (tree and other) textures, DDS DTX3 is perfect. When I used jpg's in Sketchup, I had contrasting background for tree pictures to see where exactly they were on texture. Then, for DDS I was adding similar color as trees's leaves to avoid shining edges with trasparency.
Please remember while in XPacker to set material properties as Double Sided - better look and it's easier to pick the tree in BTB. For trees, it's also good to choose "Up Pointed" for mesh normals. You can set it for objects individually or for the whole material (in case of using texture atlas).

You can refer to my tutorial: http://www.racedepartment.com/bobs-track-builder/45753-textures-finland-nature-3.html#post703309

 

[Noel Romero]

Thanks martinez, ehrlec! I'll try this out when I get home. ray:

 

[Troy Barman]

I'm trying to make some buildings with glass. Could someone help me make it look transparent?

 

[p00se2]

I'm trying to make some buildings with glass. Could someone help me make it look transparent?

what is it u need help with exactly ?


glass requirements :
glass diffuse texture
alpha mask
specular map

 

[Troy Barman]

When i put my object on the track it just looks all flat and boring and the glass is just plain blue with no transparency.

http://i450.photobucket.com/albums/qq222/Night_Leader/Untitled-1.jpg

Thats what i'm trying to make.

 

[p00se2]

you need to assign a texture that contains an alpha mask

the texture bitmap makes stuff show on the surface (dirt smudges whatever)

the alpha mask will add transparency

edit the specular map to make stuff on top of the glass surface pop out (glass more spec | dirts less spec)

 

[Troy Barman]

What do i make those with?

 

[p00se2]

What do i make those with?

http://www.gimp.org/

google for tutorials

 

[dvdmarine]

first post i think. does anyone know if its possible to repeat a small part of a texture atlas in sketchup? as far as i can tell i have 2 options.. create a new small texture with just my piece of wall and sketchup automatically tiles, or create new faces everytime i want to repeat the texture. so either many materials or many polygons by the time ive finished my track

 

[R Soul]

Perhaps the tiling could be done within the atlas texture. You could first apply and map the single texture, work out how often it tiles in each direction, e.g. 4x4 or 1x3, then do something like this crude example (the red borders are just to show you 1 tile):

 

[dvdmarine]

thanks r soul that would be a good option for smaller buildings but the one i have is quite long, seems a waste of atlas space (i guess i am maybe rationing my resources a bit over the top). pangaea has suggested there might be a way in btb using the scaling and offset options for the texture. so maybe i will try do this tiling thing in the xpacker.

 

[R Soul]

If you take the red brick texture as an example, if it went all the way across the texture it would tile horizontally, and you'd have space above and below for smaller things.

 

[Kyle Puttifer]

This is an interesting one:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/buildingmaker?hl=en&utm_source=bldmakerpage&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bldmkerconversions&ll=30%2C-97.29&zoom=2&maptype=p
This creates a texture atlas if you download the building and export from Sketchup. If you want to create you own, it only works in certain locations. Surprisingly, London isn't available.
You need to have Google Earth installed, and a Google Account.

 

[graham027]

Hi, I am trying the link however it brings me to the homepage and no tutorial, can anyone re-send or re-link the tutorial

Thanks

Graham

 

[zhangg03]

Hi Biggles1212,
I don't see anything after I click on the link you provided. Please check if the doc is still there.
Thanks!

 

[ebrich]

If its the Biggles tut on "Objects for BTB from Sketchup ", then I put it here. Don't seem to find it anywhere now, which is a shame. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8YWIV2QT

Or just found it again -- http://www.racedepartment.com/downlo...o=file&id=1805

 

[rsmithdrift]

Ok so somebody please help me out here... I'm TRYING desperately to import terrain into btb using sketchup (I have 8 and 6) and first tried using callada export from 8... get to btb xpacker and get "unhandled exception" when trying to add the dae file into "objects" in xpacker... So I read around and found I need SK6 so I found and downloaded that and saved the file from sk8 in sk6 format and exported in kmz4 formatt from their then used 7zip to extract into a folder of that name and tried adding the .dae file in the "models" folder of the extracted kmz4... same error "unhandled execption"... So I tried MAKING the file in sk6 (comes out terrible in compairison) and doing same process and get same result... unhandled execption... I can't think of ANYTHNG else to try other than shelling out 500 bucks that I literally don't have andcant do to get thepro version of 8 and using 3ds format. and I'm sure i'd still get same error knowing my luck . >_< but like i said I CAN"T do that anyways so i can't even try that option.

WTF am I doing wrong here???? according to everything I found including this thread i'm doing this EXACTLY right.

PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP I need this terrain model. I'm building several mtn touge tracks for rfactor and rbr and I can't go any farther for any of them without the terrain...