Further, to avoid leaving the (now unused) redundant meshes in the FBX model, you have to export each component separately. But, it means that if I want to make a final model in Unity’s own internal format (they call it a “prefab,” and their Asset Store criteria also require that you provide one), you have to choose between creating it from the inefficient FBX version with redundant meshes in it, or else extract one copy of the redundant meshes and replace all references to the others with that. That, of course, is purely Unity’s problem, not Trimble/SketchUp’s. The result is that the exported model will have two meshes defined, one for each knob, even though it could have used just one mesh. However, Unity’s FBX Exporter creates a separate copy of each mesh. That’s exactly what you want, as it is efficient and guarantees that any changes to the shared mesh will affect all models that use it. That is, if your model includes, say, two identical knobs and you represent them with SketchUp components, when you import your model into Unity, Unity only uses one mesh that each of the two knobs shares with the other.

The only problem I’ve noticed is that SketchUp and Unity work well together when instancing meshes, but Unity’s FBX Exporter creates a unique copy of every mesh. Once imported, Unity’s FBX Exporter seems to handle conversion just fine.

Unity does a nice job of importing SketchUp files directly (I’m using the most recent Long Term Support version of Unity, which is 2018.4, so you have to store your SketchUp files in 2018. Yes, in fact one need not even bring Collada into the workflow. You can do all your setup and grey-boxing, then very quickly export things to digital content creation tools (DCC), such as 3ds Max, Maya or Maya LT, have the artists finalize the content, and safely merge your changes back into those Assets to continue your work in Unity.Couldn’t you perfect things via Collada and then export FBX from Unity? By doing this, it enables you to round trip very easily and save loads of time. The Exporter enables Autodesk tools to be aware of your Unity project and the location of your Assets folder. The FBX Exporter package makes it smooth and easy to send geometry and animation from Unity 2017.3 or later, to any application that supports FBX, and back again with minimal effort.

The Unity FBX Exporter is available in Preview via the Package Manager from versions 2018.3 and up. The built-in Unity FBX Importer provides support for:Īnimation and animated custom properties (when present in the FBX file)

Exporting fbx from unity