Its not impossible now to get edidatbale results into Sketchup now.
If you import into Sketchup from Moi 3d withe the 3ds format you have to use the soften edges command
(ctrl + erasor) and erase all the facets that come imported see the pictures.
It would be cool to see this step automated in some kind of way.

Important is that Sketchup can draw on crved surfaces and flat but when flat surfaces
come in via 3ds they are triangulated. So the first thing to do is erase the lines that
divide the flat surfaces (not curved ones) before you start to soften.
You can then use all tools that can be used in Sketchup to build upon these planes.
You can even colour every plane














Those models can be pretty detailed and large...






Peter

Hi Peter,

> Michael did you get an answer yet ?
> Or did you talk to the people at Siggraph ?

I actually got in touch with them through e-mail a little bit before Siggraph and I have downloaded their SDK toolkit and tried it out a little bit.

One complication is that SketchUp only deals with n-gons that are strictly planar, so I can't use the sort of normal mesh export that is done for other polygon formats (such as OBJ or LWO formats).

I have to do a kind of customized one that only does n-gons for planar surfaces and then triangulates (but hides the edges like the smoothing process in SketchUp) any curved surfaces.

I'm not quite sure how it will turn out yet, but I will probably look into this some more really soon here, having a direct export to .skp format would definitely be useful to quite a few people.

- Michael

Hi Peter,

> It would be cool to see this step automated in some kind of way.

Yup, that is exactly the idea.

I'm not exactly sure yet how much work it will take, but I will be looking into this some more very soon here.

- Michael

Thank you Michael for the fast response !
In the meanwhile I think the short hands I did will be usefull for some people I hope !
Peter