SketchUp to IMVU tutorial
| Required programs: SketchUp pro V5 |
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The free version of SketchUp V5 and newer versions can be used but this site was made with SketchUp V5 Pro in mind. - Making a simple item ready to export
ok now for texturing, click the paint bucket, pick a texture and paint all the sides of your box, use at least 2 different textures. To position and size any texture right click on the texture on you mesh, go down to where it says Texture and click on Position, try playing about with each of those pins, click and drag and one of the pins and it will pull it about warping the texture, single click it and you can move the pin to warp it elsewhere, that can be useful, try pinning the texture so it fits perfectly in one of the sides, it should now look something like this, this is also where to find the position button, also you will notice when you click the paint bucket that another box pops up saying materials, when you click the In Model tab it will list all the textures used, if there are some in there you are not using always delete them otherwise they make useless and annoying files later. By clicking on the texture now and clicking on Edit you can name them at the top of the new box that comes up, this can be useful later with the previewer.
Once you have finished experimenting with moving the texture around we can get on to getting it ready to export. We first need to start by linking floating verts, this needs to be done on all mesh's to make sure everything lines up. Hears a video tut on it HERE near the bottom of the page, just a frame luckily has no floating verts so for this we can ignore it, but in more complex mesh's you will need to. (or if your lazy like me you export it to 3DS and re import it again, tho this makes texturing issues). Ok now click and drag and highlight your entire mesh (alternately if your like me and lazy press ctrl+a ) and this time click "Make Group", in both my above picks the mesh (the picture frame where creating) is centred on the axis on its back, this is because that centre point is where the final mesh will align to nodes on the floor walls and ceiling when in the client, so having it on its back now means it will hang on the walls perfectly later. Ok now save your mesh as normal, label it a nice file name and do keep this one always in case anything ever goes wrong, you with to edit it later, make a new one or use it with something else later. Now that u have saved its time to export, click on File, Export, 3D Model. Now give it a nice file name and below that where it says "Export type" click the drop down bar and select Google earth 4 (*.kmz) and export, you should now get a box appear saying mostly useless things to you, pay attention to the one at the bottom saying Textures, just in case you have forgotten to delete excess textures not being used, in our case it should be how ever many textures you have on your mesh, if there's more you should click ok delete those not in use and re save and re export.
-- SketchUp to IMVU exporter time now load up the SketchUp to IMVU exporter (USE THE ONE STATED AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE! if its all black in a DOS or Command Prompt box your using the WRONG ONE!). Click Convert one... and go find where you have saved your exported file to, then once that's done it will bring up another box asking where to put it, I usually make another folder called Output for each item I create as each item makes a number of files and you don't want them mixed up with other things. After selecting a place for it to output the new files to it will run and should look a little something like this
where it says Tut it should have the name of your file, ok now we can close that, exporting is done! now for the previewer! Tip- To keep things simple and tidy try to make a new folder for every item you export, as more complicated mesh's make many more output files.
---Previewer Now click File, Derive product, and type in number 12908, it will load up an IMVU room with an IMVU chair there. Click the "Geometry" tab, in that tab click brows and find where u exported your file to, you should come across one in there called YourFileName.xmf click it (that's the mesh itself), then click the tab "Special" now in there again click brows, this time the file you want should be strait there, this time it should be a .xsf file (That's the seating locations and node locations, in this case we don't need to know about them but we still need to load that file to remove the seating location from the IMVU chair). Ok now click the "Materials" tab, now Un-tick where lower down where it says vertex colours. Now click Brows from further up, at the moment you should be on M00, so look for the file with a [0] at the end of it, this should be an .xrf file, now a little further down the button that says Change Texture, this is where its useful when you was playing with the textures to have named your textures useful names, as you may have noticed the file you just loaded says a texture name on it followed by the number in [], now you need to click the Change texture button and lock the texture you wanted there, once that's done on your left you will notice a section called Materials, click the next one down which should be M01, and do the same as last time, only this time when you click brown load the xrf file with [1] on the end, the more texture you have the more xrf files you get and need to put in, one that is done click the big Apply Change button at the top of the previewer, you should now be seeing something that looks like this
There you have it, one mesh strait from SketchUp into IMVU, now all you need do is save and submit when you have a final product.
-Happy to accept gifts of what you made to NEO1471 if you found this helpful ^_^ | |
