Hi Chipp, it's not easy to go from SketchUp into MoI because things like those round looking housings are not truly round things in SketchUp, they're made up of a whole bunch of little individual triangle facet pieces.

CAD programs are not designed to work with highly faceted objects like that, so it's difficult to take triangulated data and convert it into CAD data. It's possible to go the reverse way which MoI will do when you do a SketchUp export out from MoI - when you do this MoI will take the large smooth CAD spline surfaces and dice them up into little facet pieces. But it's very difficult to try and automatically reform large smooth surfaces from already decimated facet data. That's why MoI has an SKP exporter but not an importer.

So really your data there is not in a form that will import very readily into MoI, since it's in a polygon mesh format you could load it into a polygon mesh modeling program but not into a NURBS focused CAD program like MoI.

A couple of things you might try would be to see if the Rhino mac version can import it and convert it into a rather poor NURBS version by using the MeshToNURB command - this will likely not work very well because every separate triangle in the polygon mesh object will become a trimmed surface in the NURBS object and CAD objects are not meant to have such a high density of little tiny separate surfaces like that, they are meant to have large smooth surfaces that have trims on them. So it will probably not work very well.

You could also look into using Wineskin to run the the Obj23DMWireframe converter program.

Another possibility might be Max's OBJ loader script from here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4104.6

But likely none of these will yield very good results because your model data being all in triangle mesh faceted form is just fundamentally a different kind of data than what MoI works with itself for modeling.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Yes, I know, but I was referring to use the wires (or other idea like backplates?) as reference objects only. I think I've got it figured out now. I get the whole NURBS vs POLYS thing but just wanted to see if there were any other workflows out there for going back and forth with templated wires. Turns out I found a couple good threads you posted awhile back and now have a pretty decent handle on the wires import and they are all separated into objects. FWIW, the 'face' option in Obj23dmWireframe.exe never did work.

I fully expected to 'rebuild' the model in MoI. The earlier pics are just concepts, not finished designs (My SU abilities would be quite tasked to put together finished design for this sort of thing :-) Thanks for the help.

Also, interestingly, the objects can be exported as OBJ in SU one at a time if necessary and they will come in 'pre-registered' in MoI. Good to know!

for the moment best when you have more than one unic object is export in 3DS format from Moi
then explode the object exported one time in sketchup
so you will have each object from Moi as component named in Sketchup obj0, obj1, obj2 etc...
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=7181.1
and see this post and following for "comparaison component / group " for optimum result of similars components / groups after import from any progrograms!
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=29279&p=551830#p551830

Thanks Frenchy!

I did see your post on that in an earlier thread. Much appreciated. What I am doing is going the other way, from the sketchup to Moi, and am using wires to rebuild the model there. I think I've got it figured out. Thanks again!

Hi Chip,

Did you try this Obj importer from Max Smirnov?

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=6674.68

http://moi3d.com/forum/get_attachment.php?webtag=MOI&hash=8e7570bc59ea9e111727dcc1a5a5a3dc&filename=importObj.zip

Huhu!
Sorry! Iin the other way it's more difficult if your objects are some complex!
Import small by small seems the only solution today!
In the same session or in multiple sessions!

Thanks Glenn! That's just what I was looking for originally. *Much appreciated!*

I just did finish the model and renders in time for a FAST CO article tomorrow. MoI performed incredibly well-- can't say the same for Keyshot (Mac version)-- tends to crash a lot. Still, the renders turned out sweet. I'll post a link to the article tomorrow sometime. For now, here's the final. Wish I had more time to detail it, but c'est la vie.

Hi Chipp, it turned out really great! It would be cool to see the article too.

- Michael

Article is up at:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3041696/this-drone-ambulance-is-totally-wild-and-totally-inevitable

Compositing could be better, was done very last sec (in fact all three done last night after midnight and before sunrise).

Cool article Chipp!!

- Michael

Thanks Michael. Frankly, I wasn't sure if MoI was up to the task of speed modeling the vehicle. I may have been more mentally at home in Lightwave, where I can find kit bash items if necessary. But Modeler doesn't have the super accurate workflow and strong Boolean and filleting commands MoI has.

FWIW, I've not had good luck doing this sort of hi Rez photo modeling in SketchUp-- just too many things can go wrong and unlike LightWave, it's difficult to hand stitch vertices in the rare case they need help. Plus the SubD plugin, while an amazing feat of programming in Ruby, doesn't have the full features of native SubD implementations of other poly apps.

Time and again I was super thankful for the obvious attention you've paid to this interface, where I would 'discover' a way of solving problems intuitively. The coolest part is, the drone is pretty much buildable at scale on my 3D printer-- I believe it's that accurate. Composed of *mostly* solids (had to separate some solids to surfaces for decaling and material application in Keyshot), the hinge mechanisms and pivots were all worked out pretty much.

All in all a success. I believe I pushed some of the bounds of MoI- 50 or so named objects each with numbers of solids, surfaces and curves. Final export was in the millions of polys in obj format. Imported and rendered beautifully in Keyshot. Though the incremental saves eventually became quite large, MoI didn't hang on me once. Surprised at how robust the Wine implementation is not to mention your fine programming.

At the first view I had believed that was a crash between a car and a drone! :)