Topic: Groups Components

[billet323]

Do Groups or Components affect the exported model from Sketchup to Lumion?

[Gaieus]

When they are flipped/mirrored, they can. See this bug report for instance (there is a workaround though).
http://lumion3d.com/forum/index.php?topic=2262.0

Apart from this bug, I sometimes encounter some different shading for tzhe normal maps when I use flipped components, too. Could not find out a pattern yet though.

[billet323]

When they are flipped/mirrored, they can. See this bug report for instance (there is a workaround though).
http://lumion3d.com/forum/index.php?topic=2262.0

Apart from this bug, I sometimes encounter some different shading for tzhe normal maps when I use flipped components, too. Could not find out a pattern yet though.

Thanks.  I notice in a lot of CGI programs groups and components dont play well.  I by habit explode everything before exporting. But i didnt know if it was the same with Lumion.  Sounds like in some cases it is.

[Gaieus]

Well, Collada can (for sure) keep group/component info and while it may not be useful too much in Lumion itself, it can still keep file size down (and import safer to Lumion as I have had memory issues with large files).

In any case, at least do not save your original file overwriting with the exploded one!

Also, after exploding, many edges and faces tend to merge but you can be sure that this is not perfect so always run a cleanup plugin first (like TT's cleanup below) and look for missing faces as if the merging operation causes some extremely small edges to be created, there is an OpenGL limitation which results in missing faces. Hopefully this won't happen though.

TT Cleanup: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=22920

Finally, there is a plugin that explodes and then groups the model by texture. This may also be useful in some cases:
http://www.smustard.com/script/GroupByTexture