Quake3World

any of you guys ever mess around with google sketchup? i spent the day toying around with it... it's pretty dope

google for sketchup

it's like modelling for dummies

Not really. Took a quick look at it, figured the free version didn't do what I wanted (only save to sketchup files and not anything else), didn't feel like paying for something like this so I uninstalled it.

sketchup is used in lots of games companies as a previsualization tool. It's a very useful and powerful way of showing your ideas clearly and quickly at a very early stage.

Yep. It's a very intuitive piece of software for quickly getting shit fleshed out.

For our project at work I managed to do 3 variations of a specific level's layout in no time at all.

We tried it at work for awhile but ended up abandoning it in favor of 2D overhead drawings + 3D concepts of areas. It's good if you're really adept at using it, and you're just doing a quick basic layout, but it can really suck when you start doing multiple revisions on a layout.

It's main problem (that pisses me off to no end) is that is automatically merges all touching faces as soon as you put elements together so triple-clicking on an element to select it selects the whole fecking model. I sometimes cheat and set elements slightly above the plane (if I feel I'll later need to tweak it).

Also...its camera controls - while trying to be intuitive - can sometimes get in the way of what you want.

heh yeah i've found a lot of issues that i have with the program that could be tuned to make it more intuitive and less awkward in some areas.

i am just using it for concept work, so it's still pretty good. But I find that if i do anything that takes more than 30 mins, then I shouldn't be using sketchup or I am mucking around too much.

wviperw wrote:We tried it at work for awhile but ended up abandoning it in favor of 2D overhead drawings + 3D concepts of areas. It's good if you're really adept at using it, and you're just doing a quick basic layout, but it can really suck when you start doing multiple revisions on a layout.

Yeah, the thing is it wasn't really design for the kind of work 'we' do with games, even in architectural visualization the models are still pretty much basic shapes, try and detail something up and you really wish you'd just used a 'proper' 3D app!

wviperw wrote:We tried it at work for awhile but ended up abandoning it in favor of 2D overhead drawings + 3D concepts of areas. It's good if you're really adept at using it, and you're just doing a quick basic layout, but it can really suck when you start doing multiple revisions on a layout.

I'm surprised anyone would prefer to design 3D worlds in 2D tbh Makes no sense to me

I'm actually quite surprised that the people in this forum didn't have a better time with it considering the push pull nature of basic geometry creation is so similar to radiant. While it's certainly not meant for creating actual in game geometry it is by far the easiest and quickest way to visualize a level early on in the design process.

blushing_bride wrote:
I'm actually quite surprised that the people in this forum didn't have a better time with it considering the push pull nature of basic geometry creation is so similar to radiant. While it's certainly not meant for creating actual in game geometry it is by far the easiest and quickest way to visualize a level early on in the design process.

Sketchup does indeed have some great tools for making several instances of push/pulls (like double clicking on a face to get the same-distanced pull) and using inference lines which is great for speed and getting the right angles/length.

But...IMHO Sketchup's push/pull nature isn't as good as Radiant's in terms of flexibility. If objects have non-square angles Sketchup has a hard time figuring out what to do. For example...say you have a cube and one of the faces isn't square to the other, instead of just extending along the angle like Radiant, Sketchup will create a new face and extend it square.

Also...as I've mentioned earlier in this thread, Sketchup's propensity to merge all touching faces as you model (which is great for most circumstances and saves trouble later) can cause MAJOR problems if you need to make big changes to your overall layout. You'll end up grabbing or stretching polygons you had no intention of touching. Basically, once you've merged the faces of two objects together it then becomes a camera dance as you continuously move your camera around and select all the faces you need...instead of just triple-clicking if the faces/objects weren't merged. Sketchup also has some variations in selection (left-to-right drag selection grabs only those complete elements within the selection area while right-to-left drag selections grab anything touching the selection area) but I find neither is very good in some circumstances...especially in a complex model. (I think that's why they have the "X-Ray" face style to make sure you didn't grab something you shouldn't have).

The only way you can get around this merging problem is to make every element a group as you build it. But...after copy/pasting several instances of your original group object, all you've made is a nested group which means you have to click like a madman to select what you want within the group as it cycles through them. This gets crazy after about 10 copy/pastes.

Basically what I'm saying is that - when you build something in Sketchup - make damned sure you know what the final product will be. If you decide to experiment with a fairly detailed existing layout you are asking for nothing but trouble and massive rebuilds of certain elements. Sometimes I find it's easier to just erase the area you want to tweak and build it again, instead of "healing" the faces and getting rid of all the lines Sketchup adds. I mentioned earlier in this thread that I made 3 variations of a layout...those variations were made from scratch instead of copy/pasting an existing layout and tweaking it.

In alot of ways Radiant leaves Sketchup behind for overall level layout application, IMHO.

I just wish Sketchup would have a flag where you could enable/disable auto face merging as you work. That would improve the program a shitload.

I generally build everything out of components and groups. This gets around the face merging (although i find that to be extremely useful as it keeps everything very neat and presentable).

Basically what I'm saying is that - when you build something in Sketchup - make damned sure you know what the final product will be. If you decide to experiment with a fairly detailed model you are asking for nothing but trouble and massive rebuilds of certain elements

I think that applies to just about any piece of 3D software. The point with sketchup is that when you start getting into nit picking details that's probably the time you should be handing the level over for full production. I wouldn't use it for anything other then quick and early visualization, that's what it was designed for afterall

blushing_bride wrote:I wouldn't use it for anything other then quick and early visualization, that's what it was designed for afterall

Agreed.

[edit] But sometimes you can be having fun with Sketchup and get carried away.

GONNAFISTYA wrote:

blushing_bride wrote:I wouldn't use it for anything other then quick and early visualization, that's what it was designed for afterall

Agreed.

[edit] But sometimes you can be having fun with Sketchup and get carried away.

agreed and guilty