Sketchup to Beamng.Drive

I worked long and hard on a sketchup model I made for a map I'm making in Beamng.Drive, but everytime I try to place it in the map, it makes the game crash. I hope I didn't do all my hard work for nothing. It took me hours to make that complex in sketchup. I'm trying to make a replica of my home town, but I can't get Beamng.Drive to work with my model. First it freezes for about 20 minutes, then it loads to 55%, then it crashes the game. I have screenshots of my model below. So far I created an almost 100% exact replica of the complex of flats I live in. It took me about 13 hours to make the first building, and it took me about 3 and a half more hours to build it into the whole complex. Please tell me how I can make my model work with Beamng.

 

I was going to make this thread about 2 hours ago, then I worked it out. I am not sure in you current case, but I know with exporting vehicles, you have to export as collada, then put it in the files you want. It is more complex with maps. You need a hightmap and all that jibble jabble.

This says how to import collada into beamng. (.DAE)

 

Yeah, I saw that video, and it worked when I imported just one building, but if I try to import the whole complex of flats, then it makes the game freeze and crash. Could it be because of the size? It is 55MB, and all those buildings has full interiors.

 

Out of curiosity, why would you still have them with completed interiors? This is just a complete waste of resources as you are not able to explore the interiors of the houses...

 

Because I used the same models I'm using for the game I'm busy developing. And My game will take place on foot, so I made interiors for those buildings. My creation currently has over 255K polygons in it, and when I finally figured out a way to get my full model in Beamng.Drive by breaking the model in two, and putting each bit in beamng separately, it was very laggy, and beamng ran like 10-15 fps. and the collisions didn't work. I know the performance issues are probably because I included full interiors for all the buildings, but I still don't understand why the collisions didn't work. Maybe my creation is too big? I tried with just one building as well, and it works, but very glitchy. I am also confused that such a small bit of buildings can cause such huge lag. I mean, sure I even modeled the attics of the houses, but it's not a lot of buildings, and it's a small area. Please give me some tips on how I can put this place: https://www.google.co.za/maps/@-33....ata=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1smBGYC9n1RXJWLBnyiBOfeA!2e0 In beamng.drive without getting slow framerates. It's the place where I live, and I would really love to make a map for beamng to explore my home town from the comfort of my own home, and share it with other people.

 

Remove the non visible parts of the interiors for beamng, uneccessary, might be able to cheat sketchups layers system to make it easier to delet the interior for beamng.

A beamng cheat is to turn collisions off for your imported model then create a second low poly model that fits over it without much detail, import that with collisions and set it to be invisible, as a lower poly mesh its collision calculations will be far simpler and for the most part entirely adequate, as its not being rendered it won't contribute there either.

 

That sounds like a great idea! Thanks for the help, I will try it!

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The low poly collision model works, but there is a new problem. I re-made the houses without interiors this time, but now nothing wants to be at the right height. If it's not floating in mid-air, half of the object is under the map. How can I fix it?

 

Make sure your.object is centered at the origin, I haven't a clue how that's done in Sketchup, but in blender the object must be at 0 0 0 to work.

Also you can always move the object about in the editor ingame

 

I did center it at the origin, but it still has the same problem with the height.

 

Explode all groups/components. Any grouped items will not collide and sometimes appear misaligned.

 

oh ok, cool thanks, I will try it. I actually thought it works better if you make it groups before exporting it, because of the tutorial video. I will try it without the groups though.

 

Wow, thanks bro, it worked!!!

 

cool, glad you got it sorted.
Groups are really handy while you are building things but screw things up when exporting. You would think that making a group is like making a separate mesh within the model but its kind of not. Sketchup seems to automatically divide the model up into sections according to connected faces with the same material within each group/component as far as i can tell. Torque3d will load the model with groups but as each group has its own origin, I think its gets confused about what one is the true origin and sometimes picks the wrong one or it tries to average out the center in a way relating to all the origins and gives an odd result. whatever it does your model is all out of line and broken and only the un-grouped stuff will collide. Exploding all the groups leaves only the main origin of the workspace in the model and not all the local origin points for all the groups.

I don't know if this is 100% true but It seems to work like that from what I can tell.