Souvarine wrote: > I have been told that SketchUp is the only modeler that support > collada natively and properly (don't know if that is true).
Even if it is, it's probably only in the version you have to pay for, not the free version (which comes with very few exporters). On the other hand, Sketchup is scriptable in Ruby, so you can probably program it to export in just about any desired format, given enough work. I think there's also a C++ library you can call from external code to read Sketchup files, if you want to approach the problem from the other end. Being able to create scenes for this thing in Sketchup is something I'd be very interested in! > Since you > like SketchUp, can you tell me if it is possible to model a whole level > with it ? Including the possibility to model terrains, put light > sources, place locations and name them, label some parts of the geometry > with specific names ? I've recently been working on a project using Sketchup to create levels for Aleph One (an open source development of the Marathon game engine). I managed to get it to do very nearly everything the Marathon engine supports, all with Ruby scripting inside Sketchup. Ruby code can attach arbitrary attributes to any object in the model, so there should be no trouble naming things. Light sources and such like can be modelled using placeholder objects that are recognised and treated specially by the exporter. There is a set of "sandbox" tools that could be used to edit a terrain mesh. So yes, all those things should be doable with Sketchup, I think. Something to consider when deciding on an export/import strategy is that funneling everything through a common format can lead to loss of information. Some modellers may support things that it would be useful to get into the scene for the game engine to use, but if they can't be expressed in the intermediate file format, you're out of luck. For example, Sketchup has a very powerful notion of component definitions and instances, which can greatly reduce the amount of data needed to describe a scene with a lot of repeated elements. But if the intermediate format didn't support component instances, the game engine wouldn't be able to take advantage of that. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Soya-user mailing list Soya-user@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/soya-user
