Hi,
I don’t know if this already have been posted, i just found this yesterday.
Babel 3D lets you upload a Sketchup .skp and get it converted online to obj/3ds, so you can import and use it in Blender… and it’s free. :yes:
It’s of course great when you want some model from Google warehouse and don’t have SU Pro.
Check it out :yes:
I love this service - I use it only and it works flawless.
Claas
Great article!
I wish I would have had this service in the previos semester for my students.
It helps so much converting files among different programs.
I can only highly recommend them because they really cover all open formats
and that in a good way, from openNURBS which is a standard in CAD to OBJ and SketchUP for interior design.
I wish I would have had this service in the previos semester for my students.
It helps so much converting files among different programs.
I can only highly recommend them because they really cover all open formats
and that in a good way, from openNURBS which is a standard in CAD to OBJ and SketchUP for interior design.
It’s also hard to believe that it’s all free.
The SU models converted looks great, colors and textures are usually included with your obj file as well.
Ok, a converted SU model often give a pretty messy mesh, but it really doesn’t matter when you just need to put some things in your environment and not have to spend days doing them manually.
This is also handy when others who only knows SU makes something, and you later want to bring it all into Blender for the final touch up and rendering.
I wonder how long it will stay free? but even with some payed month/year membership it would still be a great valuable service.
While it is nice when your somewhere at a client and have nothing to convert with you I am not really impressed or I don´t see its awesomeness.
Every average programm can convert between those formats, take MeshLab, and there I can even clean the model, reduce, recalculate and got options on convert.
And I guess the site funds by selling their email lists to advertisers so I guess it will stay free for now ^^
Pay for that service? No way, I rather use a native tool on my machine then.
The convert to pdf is a 3D pdf then?
Babel3d would be grand if it could convert from .c4d .max and .prt to other formats - those are the ones that are really problematic 
IGES and all those other mathematical formats are a great feature to have.
“Every average programm can convert between those formats” How dare you state Blender is less than average… it can’t convert between half these formats.
great service
arexma
so then the collada and SKP issues I have with Blender Meshlab are just in my imagination?
Exactly… i’ve tried the SU->collada->Blender and SU->collada->Meshlab->Blender and i know i’m not a pro at any of this but i never seemed to get any good results.
The models were either distorted or unreadable by Blender, and textures never seemed to make it all the way into Blender.
But with Babel it was easy, quick and most models worked quite well with colors and textures included.
But… if something else works better for someone, no problem, please share your steps.
I just wanted to share a service i personally found very helpful. :yes:
@alltaken: how dare you imply blender is just a converter? jk 
What I meant was that converting between mesh formats isn´t really magic.
A great service is one that converts solid to meshdata and vice versa, which still is a huge undertaking.
And there are other tools than blender and meshlab - not free though, so my mistake.
And I havent had any problems C4D>collada>Blender including textures so far (what I mostly use for collaborations as most advertising agencies here use C4D)
Other than that I mostly have to get stuff from Unigraphics NX and SE to Blender, which is a pain and so far only MeshLab and 3DTool did a decent job, DeepExploration is nice too, but too expensive for my needs.
Beyond that I often get prototype data or data that is under a NDA… not so cool to send it to a random website.
So yeh, great service, but not for me, so I think I am allowed not to be all that impressed.
Here I’ve been compiling Blender with Collada support so I can just export directly from SketchUp to Blender. Though, Collada in 2.5x is a little… Buggy.
ive tweeted babel 3d and they are gonna look into converting straight to .blend for us. wouldnt that be kool
That would be O.O
Gonna have to show my SketchUp teacher that (I’m taking a SketchUp class in college).
When i downloaded sketchup it would let me save it as COLLADA which then imports into blender anyway!
I have never got that way to work, the exported collada always turns up broken with missing parts and often distorted meshes.
I did a quick test today with a model from SketchUp.
Cheers 
but is it possible in a near future? or when 2.6 arrives, the collada files would work with blender ?
wow man, that is cool
but this means that the guys from SU are pretty bad people and didn’t implement the exporting to actually work. Hooray to Babel3D
but i would love to have have a convertor that works offline, to make the objects from SU intro dae, and import them in blender.
It is really excellent.
