Bonjour philippe - unfortunately it is somewhat tough to do this, since SketchUp files only contain polygons and not NURBS surfaces like MoI is designed to use.

So for example if you have something that looks similar to a sphere in a SketchUp file, it is not really a sphere but instead a whole bunch of little planar facets with their edges hidden to make it look as if it were smooth.

This kind of fragmented geometry does not work very well with MoI - MoI is designed to work on a sphere as one large smooth surface patch that actually defines an exact sphere and not a fragmented approximation.

So it is not in general a great fit for MoI to bring in SketchUp data, in many cases the data is just not the type of data that MoI is meant to work on.

However, you can export smooth surfaces from MoI into SketchUp format. When you do this MoI will break its smooth surfaces down into facets and write those facets to the SKP file.

But unfortunately it is very difficult to do the reverse process automatically - it's sort of like how if you start with apples you can make applesauce by smashing them up. However, if you start with applesauce it is not easy to try and make apples back from that.


I think in the future I should be able to add some mechanism to bring in polygon data to use just as a visual and snapping reference rather than as actual geometry to work with (to trim and boolean, etc...). But I don't expect to have this ready for v2 though, possibly for v3.


In the meantime, you may want to take a look at the OBJ to 3DM wireframe converter program which is available here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Resources#Obj23dmWireframe_converter

If you can export your polygon data to an .obj file, you can run that converter program on it to extract the edges of the polygon data to a .3dm file as line segments and then load that into MoI to use as a reference. That may be useful for getting some kind of reference set up in the current version.

- Michael

the probleme of obj convertor is import triangle wire and not ngone or juste contour line.

thank for reponse

best regard

< the probleme of obj convertor is import triangle wire and not ngone or juste contour line.
And you can use some prog like Meshlab for cleaning your mesh before the conversion
http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

Depending of the prog who make the obj ;) (here Zbrush --->Moi)

Hi phillipe,

> the probleme of obj convertor is import triangle wire and
> not ngone or juste contour line.

Actually n-gons are supported by the obj converter.

I've attached an example file - the 8-sided-ngon.obj file has an 8-sided n-gon polygon in it, and the result of running the converter is the 8-sided-ngon.3dm file which has the wireframe outline of the n-gon in it.

But OBJ files cannot have polygons that have holes in their interiors, probably things like that will get converted into triangles when you try to convert from SketchUp to an OBJ file using whatever mechanism.


> or juste contour line.

These are kind of a similar problem as the polygons - curves in SketchUp are made up of a lot of little line segments and are not truly smooth objects, so it would not work very well to try and actually open such things inside of MoI as regular model data and actually try to use them as regular curves like for sweeping, etc..

- Michael

ok i try , maybe have make a mistake

thank for all

Also maybe the converter has a bug - if you have an OBJ file that does not seem to work with the converter, can you please post it or e-mail it to me at moi@moi3d.com so I can take a look at it?

- Michael

ok thank no probleme obj converteur work well