Sketchup to Blender ugly mesh repair

Support Modeling
#1

I am a long time Sketchup user that is slowly moving to Blender (the learning curve coupled with free time being the factor), I have an anthology of organic modeled cartoon characters that I intend to import into blender for rigging but I’m finding the mesh from Sketchup to be just horrible, too many tri’s and ngons. After running a cleanup and one of TIG’s plugins to convert tri’s to quads which IMO does not do what I hoped I export the mesh to Blender and run an alt+J then remove doubles and find that it does slightly improve the mesh but not enough for what I need. So, what I am asking is if anyone has a better solution (I know many will say to remodel it in Blender, that is not an option right now as my Blender skills are not there yet and secondly we are talking over 200 models)

I was wondering if there may be a plugin that could totally re-mesh (made up word) my models, kind of like skinning them in quads on another layer?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

#2

Well there’s the remesh modifier.(Bad idea - see next post) They stole your word right out of your brain before you even made it up. Unfortunately no method that Is automatic will preserve details very well. There’s a variety of smoothing and relaxing tools you can use but it’s all some form of remodeling - it’s just a matter of how much time you want to spend on it. Are they all flat surfaced objects like buildings then the decimate mod does an excellent job with planar.

#3

Well there’s the remesh modifier.
That would absolutely not be suitable for this purpose.

You’ll need to retopologise your mesh
There are a couple of addons that will help do this
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/Surface_Sketch
http://cgcookie.com/downloads/contours-retopology-tool/
Tutorials http://cgcookie.com/blender?s=retopology&s_type=tutorials

If you want an automatic retopology solution that would give you something closer for rigging you’ll need to use something like ZBrush, 3D Coat, Mudbox

#4

Thank you for that reply, I have looked at some videos online as to how it works with Z Brush, too bad Z brush has such a strange UI as it has such potential, but pricey, I will take a look at 3D Coat.

#5

3D coat worked like a charm, thank you.

wiley 3d coat.jpg550×760 107 KB

wiley SU.jpg687×911 70.5 KB