I know this reply is kind of late, but I'm still looking into this myself.

I've had the problem back with Daz 4 as well. When I got a hold of their support team, I was told that COLLADA (.dae) files are a rough standard. Not sure how much I believe that or if I mis-understood support.

Google / Trimble / whoever currently owns Sketchup says that it uses the COLLADA 1.4 specifications and schema (as of 10/16/2012 at least). I couldn't find a similar specification on DAZ. The closest I've come is to notice that Daz never puts just "COLLADA" files, it's always "DAZ COLLADA", which makes me think they might be the ones breaking the format. Don't know since I don't have any other 3D editor to try exporting with.

Hopefully someone comes along and fixes this, since COLLADA is really the only way to transition between the two (without having Sketchup Pro).

I work for a 3D service bureau. We sell the printers ($1500 to over $250,000) and provide the service to those who only want or need occasional 3D printing.

Unfortunately, a college student who needs a model for a term project may have to pay hundreds or thousands for an appropriately large model. I know this to be true because we have had students inquire about our services, and some have used us to build models. We are at least 15% less costly than industry average, and the student models were over $800. That was last June.

Now there are some 3D printers that would have been capable of producing the model that cost $500. There would have been less than $200 of material used. If the printers that exist now had been available then, they would have saved money.

3D printers won't "change the world" and that isn't something I said. But, where it makes sense, 3D printing technology will provide positive changes in the way things are done. Would it not be better to have a generation of children who are actively engaged in development and design? So what if all they make are toys, they would be using their brains for creativity instead of mindlessly watching TV or playing console and computer games (tho games have their own benefits).

So while there are lots of prototyping technologies available as you list, these service bureaus are extremely expensive to use. Extremely expensive. And it makes sense that they would be costly to use, their equipment is the commercial grade stuff that we sell. They have to recoup costs. The point is, with 3D printers available for as little as $500 (and the quality is pretty good. 0.15 mm layer thickness). lots of people will be able to buy them and use them with free software to produce lots of things for a very low price.

What we are seeing here is just the start of the "home 3D printer" movement. The rate of improvement and price reductions is incredible. Would I buy one for myself at home? Probably not, since I get to use the 3D printers at my office. But, if I lost my job, I would likely buy one of these low cost beasties since I do have clients that pay me money to build them stuff that I design.

Scouting troups, RC clubs and other groups are likely purchasers of this technology. Yes, there are RP service bureaus. Again, I work at one. But these "clients" don't need the 16 micron layer thickness that our units provide. It just doesn't have to be that good.

One of my prospects asked for a quote on a model. It was going to cost them $1100. I checked Shapeways for the cost of the same item built on a lower quality process (FDM, extrusion) and the cost was only $200 less. Using a plaster technology was still $400. If our company had a FDM machine, we would have only charged $300 for the model. Like I said, the online services are VERY expensive. That would be a prime motivator to buy your own 3D printer IF you don't need thin layers and IF you will be needing to make other models. Just think, in less than 4 models and the device will effectively pay for itself.

It might seem odd advocating for the "home" 3D printers when I work for a business that offers this service and concentrates on the higher quality devices, but just like some people buy Porsche, BMW, Benz, and other premium cars, there will also be people who buy general purpose Ford, GM and Dodge vehicles.

And there will be people who don't see much sense in home 3D printers, well, I don't see much sense in most rap music. But there are plenty of rap artists that are not hurting for cash, so that means that there is a market. Just because something doesn't make sense to me doesn't mean it won't make sense to others. And if you see the rate of growth in the home 3D market, you will realize that a lot of people see sense in having a home 3D printer. What will they do with them? Who knows, who cares. If your not involved, it just doesn't matter. If you are involved or want to be, then it is great.

So, Joe, our opinions don't really matter. 3D printing technology will continue to improve and develop. And people will buy them for home use for whatever purpose makes sense to them. Just based on current trends, it is easy to see that 20% of the population will likely have one within the next decade. That is solely based on trends, not my nor any other person's hopes and dreams. Actually, for my business, I hope that the home maker market fails. More business for me that way. But I also see that it is not likely to fail. Trends indicate that it will keep on going, the pace accelerating, so it is available to just about anyone who wants one.

10 years ago, a 32 inch LCD TV was rare to find in someone's house. We have a 46", and two 32" sets. What changed? The price.
In the 1940's few homes had a TV but just about everyone had a radio. In the 1960's color TVs were rare, by the 80's they were common. Now almost everyone has a TV and probably a LCD one at that. We are at the beginning of another technology shift. A change in the game. And this change may just bring North America back to being inventive, creative and productive. I doubt that anyone in the USA or Canada would want our economies to stay stagnant.

Encouraging inventiveness, creativity and production would be a good thing, would you not agree?

Maybe having these home 3D printers, and the FREE design software can help the process. (Free software such as Sketchup, 123D, Sculptris and even D|S).

So, yes, while the RP services exist - and there will be an ongoing need these commercial services - there will also be a market for home 3D printers; just like in the automotive market. Some people buy or need premium equipment, others just need general purpose.

Hi!

I come from fractalforums.com because I have started to 3D print 3D fractals, and I need some 3D modeling tools in the middle of the process. I typically use Meshlab.

I've got a 5.5M faces mesh that I'd like to decimate to 1M. It's got highly tesselated large flat areas and the "Merge coplanar faces" in Hexagon is exactly what I need. I have tested it on a smaller mesh, but the big one doesn't even load (265 MB STL file)

Is there a practical limit in number of faces in Hexagon?

If yes, does anyone know a free program that can merge coplanar faces on large meshes? (Sketchup can do the job at DAE import time, but is too slow with large meshes)

I thought Meshlab would offer the option, but the closest filter is the quadric edge decimation and it's not what I want, because it can affect edges and does not necessarily optimize planar areas.

Thanks!

bib

I've generally had better success using an obj export plugin in SketchUp than I've had using Collada files in DS...

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/

Has anyone had any success importing Collada DAE files from Google's 3D Warehouse?

cool isolinear chips - saw a pair on sketchup and tried to covert them a while back but they didnt convert well

here is page 5 of my graphic sorta novella

Done for Turbulence1973 Star Trek - Gamma Fleet Operations GFO. - http://turbulence1973.deviantart.com/journal/Star-Trek-Gamma-Fleet-Operations-269989115
Note: this is just me having fun - in no means done as any story or timeline created by Turbulence1973 and may or may not actually continue on another page LOL

the grammar again is probably horrible also lol

A larger easier readable version can be found at my DeviantArt page

I like the Idea of this thread.
I'm new to Carrara. I do motion graphics and technical animations for educational video's.
I had a background in Sketchup, Alibre, a little Solidworks, and Autocad.
I work professionally as a recording engineer, but wish to sell some video's online.
I don't expect large sales from these video's so hiring out an animator is not possible.
I first played around with something called sketchers studio, which was intended to be an animation program for Sketchup.
It was very simple and was never developed, but it got me started.
I looked through 3d graphics magazines to see what programs could do this type of work. The magazines often showed character renders, or renders of elaborate scenes. Maybe a still high res image of a beautiful car, but I was hard to tell if any of these software packages would do what I wanted.
I tried Blender, but the interface was just too much for me. I think if you understood the concepts to begin with, Blender might be excellent, but I had a lot of learning to do.
I tried Carrara demo then bought the book that contained Carrara 6 Pro. So I got in cheap. At first I imported objects from Sketchup, and Alibre. The conversion process had a few issues ( mainly having to convert file types), so I started modeling simple objects in Carrara.
When I was stumpted, I found excellent tutorials on youtube. The manual is over 700 pages and covers a lot of territory. If the manual and youtube don't cover it there are some very helpful people on this user group. Which is HUGE!
( thank you 3Dage, Holly, evilproducer, Joemama2000, etc)
At this point I model almost everything I need in Carrara. I like the fact that I can make changes on the fly as my skills improve, without going back to my modeling program and reload. FOR MY NEEDS, I have found almost nothing I can't do as far as modeling and animation.
This program amazes me constantly. I have no desire to be a professional graphics artist or animator. I do have a desire to be a one man band as far a a small film producer, and Carrara fits the bill. I edit the video's in Sony Vegas, and between these two programs I'm amazed at what can be done. Will a pro look at my work and see how it could be improved? Of course. but everybody I've shown clips to literally says "wow who did the animation"? I have since upgraded to 8 pro.In part because I wanted to support Daz, in part because I wanted to take full advantage of the 64bit version 8. and I got it cheap on sale.
I'm rendering full HD movie clips at 29.97 FPS, the quality of the render looks sharp and crisp.
You will see comments on this group about needs for updates, and I believe at the level these people are working they are legitimate issues, but with the type of work I am doing there are almost none. If someone is starting out doing simple animations I think it could be a very long time before they hit the limits or shortcomings of this program.

At my level Carrara is affordable, powerful, and a reasonable interface. Though I don't think you could call any Modeling, rendering, or animating software " easy". Before starting my project I did ask a pro how he did a technical animation for the New York Times web site. He even did a small clip for me to start this project. The answer was vague and long. Maya, Final Cut, adobe after effects. Once I started doing this work I began to understand his answer. He did use a good 12 grand worth of software. I used Carrara Pro, Sony Vegas Pro, Corel Suite, maybe under a grand's worth of software. ( I may add Apple Motion for $50.00) But with out doubt Carrara covers a lot of that territory. I could have gotten by for much less if I didn't buy the Pro versions as well or stuck with Carrara 6Pro. Let me state one last Time. I am not a Professional Graphics artist or animator. I have no desire to work in that field as a professional, where I think you would need to know the standard software packages. The software I use does have limits compared to the " Pro" packages like Maya. I just don't think for the work I am doing I am hitting those limits.
Though I have wondered if you can't afford to go to school to learn the big packages is Carrara a good place to learn the concepts?
I've learned a heck of a lot these past few months.
I'm almost done with the second chapter of my project which has almost 15 minutes of HD animation.
I'm going to post some samples on Youtube soon .
I'll post a link here.
8068

Hi there all, Created a little room in sketchup for importing into bryce. Now I know it's a high standard but it works really well with light and materials in Bryce, heres a few images to know what your getting. Enjoy!

p.s, the reason i created the room was to create an image of a dark room with shards of light bending around the stairs.

File type : OBJ

http://speedy.sh/AvN4W/stairs-in-room.obj

A row of hearts, all done in slightly different ways.
The only "cheat" being that the one on the far right was drawn up in Sketchup, extruded and then saved as a Collada .dae file.

The other three were variously done using 16 bit tiff files imported into the terrain editor (with two of those then being turned in to symmetrical lattices.

Cherokee said:

betsy662 said:

there is a 64 Galaxy done up in sections for sketchup, I converted and built it in DS, but boy was that a chore, and it also didn't come out looking too good!

I tried that one too because I've wanted a 1964 Galaxie in 3d like forever and I was rather disappointed that it didn't look to good when converted.

The really sad thing was, it didn't look bad while putting it together, it was when I started shading it that all the flaws showed up!

betsy662 said:

there is a 64 Galaxy done up in sections for sketchup, I converted and built it in DS, but boy was that a chore, and it also didn't come out looking too good!

I tried that one too because I've wanted a 1964 Galaxie in 3d like forever and I was rather disappointed that it didn't look to good when converted.

There are a lot of cars I would love to see done, I know that Dan Palatnik has made some real beauties, but they aren't available to those of us who use DAZ and Poser very much, while there are some that can be converted from the gta websites, there is a 64 Galaxy done up in sections for sketchup, I converted and built it in DS, but boy was that a chore, and it also didn't come out looking too good!

betsy662 said:

Yep, seems the good folks that redo these cars for gta make many improvements to them!

Many of the models we see the GTA sites were originally converted to NFS by the original artist. They are then converted from NFS to GTA by someone else. The cars on Sketchup and orther sites are not from the originals but conversions from either GTA or NFS.

Dan Palatnik over at Rendo creates his own car models. He also has a forum section on one the NFS sites where he converts his cars to NFS. Someone else will rip that car from NFS and convert it to GTA. I've chatted with MindFuck at gta-worldmods.de and GTA Classics and he said DAn Palanik has given him permission to do those conversion from NFS or the origiinal models to GTA.

The Sketchup cars and the 1964 Mercury (and many others on these free sites) are not from the originals but are conversion from NFS or GTA cars.

If you look closely at the cars many of the cars on animium, you'll notice many of them are from the DMI site.

JoeMamma2000 said:

And back to the 3D printers discussion....

Someone said that the software used by 3D printers is free. It's not. Someone, somewhere, pays for it. And it's probably the people who buy the 3D printer. Nothing whatsoever to do with free and/or "open source" software. If you sell a 3D printer, you need to have control over the software that runs it, so that the software integrates with your printer. Specifically. And continues to work with it as you make changes to the hardware. That is NOT the place for "open source" software.

The software that comes with a 3D printer can be considered to be an advanced "driver" for the printer. So, yes, the cost is included in the hardware. You can't buy it separately.

However, MeshLab, Sketchup, 123D Design, 3D Via Shape, MakeHuman.org, MeshMixer, Sculptris, Paint.net and several other programs are available without cost to the user. I am happy to report that I did not pay a cent for any of these programs. Some are open source, some are abandoned projects. Some are watered down versions of the commercial versions - but none of this detracts from the fact that they are available to people for use without charge.

Some of the programs I use are listed above. With those programs I can create a 3D model, export the model to .STL and correct the model so that the "driver" software of my 3D printer can produce an error free plastic model. Without the design software (free), conversion software (free) and correction software (free), my 3D printer would be about as useful as a small end table, and much more expensive.

Would I try to make a living with a "hobby level" 3D printer? Only if I were delusional.

I got a few new Sketchup 8 cars converted to .obj. Not the best meshes, but great for backgraound cars. The 59 Cadillac is pretty cool though. Fairly nice mesh. Others are low poly and small files, load real quick. Here are some renders.

:-)

So, I got Sketchup 8 Pro trial. 8 hours of time for free. Got a bunch of cool SKP8 cars, then saved them in SKP7 format. Then exported in .3ds, took into Poseray and converted to .obj files. Even when the trial runs out, I can still open SKP8 files, then resave in SKP7 foremat, open them in it and export them.

I found it earlier. There are a bunch of old cars made for Sketchup 8 that you can't get for Sketchup 7 or earlier. Gonna have to get version 8 and see what they look like.

:-)

music2u4u said:

betsy662 said:

You can get the car complete, its a sketchup model, you can also get the frame, engine and stuff separate as well.

Link?

:-)

I simply do a search for 1932, but heres a link!

http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=d8ad08d9ce0698a1ba784271b617106d&prevstart=0

betsy662 said:

You can get the car complete, its a sketchup model, you can also get the frame, engine and stuff separate as well.

Link?

:-)

You can get the car complete, its a sketchup model, you can also get the frame, engine and stuff separate as well.