Hi Felix,

> I noticed when I export to skp that Moi solid turn
> into individual entities as SU calls them and when
> I use obj instead, all solids turn into groups in SU
> and even the name I used in MOI are present, I'm
> I missing something on the skp export?

Which version of SketchUp are you using? Over here if I export a solid like a box for example, when I open it in SketchUp v7 it's a connected set of objects, for example triple clicking on one face in the box selects the entire box.

Objects in SketchUp are made up of multiple smaller entities though, like a box in SketchUp is made up of 18 individual smaller entities - 6 faces and 12 edges, that's just fundamentally how SketchUp functions. But when you export a solid from MoI these various entities are welded together to share vertices in common with each other, that's why you can triple click it in SketchUp to select it all as one object. That's the same kind of structure as if you were to just draw the box directly in SketchUp.

Are you seeing something different than that, or are you maybe more used to working with a group object in SketchUp? Currently MoI just exports regular geometry and does not create group objects, but in the future I'll probably be changing the SKP export to make groups instead.

Some of the advantages to using SKP export rather than OBJ is that with MoI's SKP export you'll be able to get planar faces in MoI to come through as simple planes in SketchUp, including ones that have internal holes in them. OBJ format does not have any way to represent a polygon that has a hole inside of it, so if you use OBJ planes with holes in them will get split in half. Also the SKP export from MoI makes sure to set all the edge flags for smooth surfaces to correspond to the original surface structure in MoI, whereas OBJ import into SKP is probably going to use things like the angle between polygon faces to decide whether to make an edge to be hidden and smooth or not and that can sometimes make the wrong choice for that which can leave some edges visible in what was originally a smooth single surface in MoI.

- Michael