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I discovered Google Sketchup during the weeked and now I am in love with it. It really is exceptionally easy and fun to use, totally in another league than, say, gmax or Blender. (But, if I already knew well how to use one of those, I might grumble and say Sketchup is a toy, 3D design is supposed to be painful to learn ahd hard to use, or something... Keep in mind, though, that Sketchup used to be a sold for something like $500. Now when Google has acquired it, there is a quite adequate gratis version, and a Pro version that still costs about that much.)
Now, from a MS Flight Simulator point of view, the problem of course is how to get from the KMZ format that Sketchup exports to something FS SDK tools can understand. KMZ version 4 files are actually zip archives that contain a very small KML wrapper file and then the actual model is in the COLLADA format, plus any texture images used. So, the problem actually is to get from COLLADA to something the SDK understands.
(Sketchup's native format is .skp, but that is presumably not intended for interoperability and totally undocumented.)
I must confess I am very new at FS 3D object design and haven't actually even gone through any step-by-step tutorial on how to design objects with the (FSX) SDK yet. But from what I have browsed the documentation, the DirectX .x file format is used as the source format at least by some tool.
To convert from COLLADA to DirectX one easily accessible solution (doesn't require buying, stealing or borrowing expensive software) seems to be to use Blender. It has both a COLLADA importer and a DirectX exporter. Unfortunately, one needs to separately download and install a newer version of the Blender COLLADA importer, and even then there are some bugs that need to be worked around: Either the COLLADA importer, Blender itself, or the DirectX exporter don't seem to like the long filenames with relative paths that the .dae (COLLADA) files produced by Sketchup typically contain. The pathnames get truncated into the .x file. So one needs to edit those before feeding the file into Blender. Also, Blender's UI is of course quite quirky.
Anyway, such fixing of pathnames (and corresponding rename of the texture files extracted from the KMZ file) could be automated, and somebody who knows how to script Blender (in Python) probably also could automate the import and export, so that there would be just one command to convert from a .kmz file to a .x file plus a set of texture files.
Then one can download cool buildings from Google 3D Warehouse and put them into the simulator. Cool! I think the 3D Warehouse license even allows redistributing such, so somebody could download all such buildings that aren't already present in FS, convert them to FS, and offer to others.
For designing airport buildings, and maybe even aircraft models, Sketchup, at least to me, looks like a much nicer tool than the traditional ones that have a very steep learning curve...
--tml
Now, from a MS Flight Simulator point of view, the problem of course is how to get from the KMZ format that Sketchup exports to something FS SDK tools can understand. KMZ version 4 files are actually zip archives that contain a very small KML wrapper file and then the actual model is in the COLLADA format, plus any texture images used. So, the problem actually is to get from COLLADA to something the SDK understands.
(Sketchup's native format is .skp, but that is presumably not intended for interoperability and totally undocumented.)
I must confess I am very new at FS 3D object design and haven't actually even gone through any step-by-step tutorial on how to design objects with the (FSX) SDK yet. But from what I have browsed the documentation, the DirectX .x file format is used as the source format at least by some tool.
To convert from COLLADA to DirectX one easily accessible solution (doesn't require buying, stealing or borrowing expensive software) seems to be to use Blender. It has both a COLLADA importer and a DirectX exporter. Unfortunately, one needs to separately download and install a newer version of the Blender COLLADA importer, and even then there are some bugs that need to be worked around: Either the COLLADA importer, Blender itself, or the DirectX exporter don't seem to like the long filenames with relative paths that the .dae (COLLADA) files produced by Sketchup typically contain. The pathnames get truncated into the .x file. So one needs to edit those before feeding the file into Blender. Also, Blender's UI is of course quite quirky.
Anyway, such fixing of pathnames (and corresponding rename of the texture files extracted from the KMZ file) could be automated, and somebody who knows how to script Blender (in Python) probably also could automate the import and export, so that there would be just one command to convert from a .kmz file to a .x file plus a set of texture files.
Then one can download cool buildings from Google 3D Warehouse and put them into the simulator. Cool! I think the 3D Warehouse license even allows redistributing such, so somebody could download all such buildings that aren't already present in FS, convert them to FS, and offer to others.
For designing airport buildings, and maybe even aircraft models, Sketchup, at least to me, looks like a much nicer tool than the traditional ones that have a very steep learning curve...
--tml