SketchUp Is Still Free

Low Poly Museum Creation

For low poly designs, SketchUp is excellent for quick model creation. There is a free edition available to download still (SketchUp Make 2017), this allows for OBJ file exports. Unfortunately, none of the textures I tried to export with this file made it through – I tried adding textures in Blender, but no luck there either. This hopefully won’t be a difficult issue to resolve.

I’m now developing locally using a VSCode extension to host and serve my files. This gets around a lot of CORS request pain & using GitHub to host models.

The model successfully loads in Three.js

The shading for some of the walls works, but not all of them. This is an interesting error – perhaps not all walls are double sided, and this is something to be careful of?

Successful implementation of FirstPersonControls.js

FirstPersonControls.js is a horrible camera controller. I can see why they haven’t given an example for it in the documentation, I feel sick using it. I spent a lot of time failing to import an older version of the library, luckily GitHub delivered the goods. What I actually want are PointerlockControls, “the perfect choice for first person 3D games”.

Next time I’ll implement the PointerLockControls and play more with materials – I’d love to paint these on and customise them in Blender, ideally with bump maps for nicer texture effects.