all right, so in today's video, we're going to talk about how to take our SketchUp models and bring them into Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine, as many of you know, is one of the leading game engines in the world, but it's also becoming a tool that you can use in order to create real-time renderings from your models. Let's go ahead and just jump into it. All right, so Unreal Engine is available for free to download. So you can download it by going to UnrealEngine.com and clicking on the download button in the upper right-hand corner. And so there's a note on this page showing you what the cost is and more information about this. So Unreal Engine is free to use for things like films and architecture and other things like that. There is a royalty if you create and sell games, but for most of my audience, you're not going to have to worry about that, at least on this channel. So this also gives you access to all the features, the Mega scans Library, everything is available for free now.

will note you should probably pay attention to your system requirements over here to make sure that your system can actually run this. There's more information right here. But the first thing you're going to want to do is you're going to want to download the Epic Games Launcher to your computer. So you can click on this button right here to download the launcher. And what that's going to do is that's going to download a file that you can open up. You can access Unreal Engine through that launcher. Alright, so once you get the Epic Games Launcher installed, you want to go down to the Unreal Engine tab. And you want to go to the library tab right here. And there's going to be an option here for engine versions. You can click on the plus button. And then you can click this drop down to find a version and download to your computer. And so in this case, you want to make sure that you download Unreal Engine version 5. That's the newest version and it works a little different than the older version. So make

sure you're working on version 5 or above for this tutorial. And so then, once you've done that, you can click on the button right here to launch Unreal Engine. And what that's going to do is that's going to pop up a window that looks like this. It's going to be your project browser, and this is going to contain information for the different kinds of things that you can create inside, right? So there's game options, there's recent projects if you're working with any of those, there's a bunch of different presets in here for different things. You can kind of click through these if you're doing architectural visualization. Creating an arcvish project can be a good way to kind of take a look at some of the settings and that kind of thing. In this case, we want to create a blank project right here. And then you're going to set your project location, and you're going to name it. So in this case, I'm just going to name this SketchUp import. And notice how you can't include

a space in here so I'm going to call it SketchUp import. One word, then I'm going to click on the option to create. And so what it's going to do is it's going to go through and it's going to create an Unreal Engine project. And this can actually take a little while, so um, just be patient while it's actually creating the project. Unreal Engine can take a while to load um, because there's a lot of stuff getting like compiled and loaded in and that kind of thing, so just be aware of that, that depending on your computer speed, this may take a minute before you can actually get into the engine itself. Alright, so after a while um, you're gonna get a window that looks something like this. You may get a window down here. This is Project file is out of date, would you like to update it? Usually I just click on yes, and it's going to go through and update this. It doesn't really seem to take very long um, but yeah, I usually do that. And so this is going to work somewhat similar.

to flying around in SketchUp, but also somewhat not right in the sense that you have this central area in here, which is your 3D viewport that you're going to work in. You've got these different things that are in here that you can move around. So, like, for example, you've got this camera that sets up what's actually shown in your camera export. You've got other things in here like lighting and other things like that. So you've got all these objects in here, and then you can also navigate around the 3D space. And usually, the way that you do this is you want to hold down the right mouse button. So if you hold down the right mouse button and click and drag, you can look around. And then you can use the W, A, S, and D keys to move around, and then the Q and E keys to move up and down. So very similar to how actual game engines work. Note that once you let up on your mouse like this, that's no longer going to work. So you want to hold that

right Mouse button down, so that you can navigate inside of Unreal Engine. We can talk more about this in the future if there's more interest, but for now, let's talk about how to import a SketchUp model. All right, so we're going to download a model from Taz 1985 and try to bring it into Unreal Engine. So, this is the genie house that we can bring in, and I'm just going to download this into SketchUp from the 3D Warehouse. Note that you do have to be in the pro version of SketchUp in order for this to work. I don't think there's a way for Datasmith to bring things into Unreal Engine from the free version, but I haven't spent a ton of time researching that. So, we've got this model right here, right? And what we need to do is we need to export this to Unreal Engine. In order to bring in models from SketchUp into Unreal Engine, you need to install an extension for SketchUp. And so, you can find this extension by going to this page. I'll

link to it in the notes down below, but it's basically unrealinged.com. Your region, and then Data Smith plugins. What you want to do is you want to scroll down, and you want to find the Data Smith SketchUp Pro exporter. And so in this case, we're going to use the one for SketchUp Pro. I'm going to use the one for Windows. So you just want to download this exporter right here. And what that's going to do is that's going to download and install our file that you can use in order to install this. And so what you want to do is you want to run the exporter file that's downloaded, and then open up SketchUp. And when you do that, there should be an extension in SketchUp called Data Smith. Data Smith is basically the tool that Unreal Engine uses to get data from external programs into Unreal Engine. So we're going to use this in order to export to Unreal Engine. So make sure that you've installed that in SketchUp, and then we're going to jump back into

Unreal Engine. And so, what we need to do is we need to take our model, and we need to import it into Unreal Engine. So, to do that, we're going to click on this box right here for quickly add to the project. And again, note that I am in version 5.0. If you're in any of the four versions, this is going to look completely different, so make sure you're working in 5.0. But we're going to click on this button right here, and then we're going to scroll down and notice how there are cool things that we can download, like things from Quixel. But we want to go to Datasmith. And then, in this particular situation, we want to click on direct link import. That's going to go find anything that's running that has a Datasmith exporter inside of it that's currently active. Well, in this case, it's finding that SketchUp model. So, you want to make sure, again, that that extension is enabled. And so, one thing I've found is I needed to go into SketchUp, and I needed to toggle

on this toggle direct link auto sync in order for this to actually bring this in. So I clicked on this button right here, and then I went back into Unreal Engine. And now when I did this and I did a direct link import and selected my model, it's going to give me an option for location for importing our content. And so that's basically asking where should we put the files for this particular object. And so in this case, you can put it in either one of these, or you can create your own folder. So I might right click in here and click on new folder, and I'm just going to call this SketchUp import. And you can really put these wherever you want, but in this case, now I have a folder for them. I'm just going to click on this, and I'm going to click on OK. And then it's going to ask me a few things about what I want to bring in, like do I want to bring in geometry and lights, cameras, all those different things. In this case, I'm going to select yes, and I'm not really going

to mess with the advanced stuff for right now, I'm just going to click on import. And so, this is going to take the data from your SketchUp model and import it into Unreal Engine. And so, this has now been brought into Unreal Engine and you can come in here and you can make adjustments to different things if you decide that you want to do that. And so, we can fly around our model using the WASD keys. You can also do things like adjusting the lighting that's built into this scene. So, if we scroll up and we want to go look at like the sun sky object right here, so that's the sun sky that's casting light in your scene right now. Well, what you can do - and I'm going to zoom out a little bit just so you can see this - is you can adjust the rotation and location of that sun by selecting the sun and sky and adjusting things like the month. You can adjust the day as well as the time. And so, notice when you do that, your lighting is going to update.

in here, as you do that, so it's a pretty powerful way to visualize your lighting and other things like that. You can also do things like using the camera, so if I click on the camera right here, notice how this camera is going to show us different things, right? This is an object that we can actually move around, so we can adjust things like the rotation. So if I wanted this to pitch up or something like that, we can use this to create fly-through animations and other things using things that are inside of this scene. Another thing you can do is you can also go into the content folder, and we were in the SketchUp import, but I also have a starter content folder that gets brought in that contains things like different pre-built materials as well. So let's say, for example, that we wanted to apply a different wood material to this object right here. I could either click and drag this wood material onto this object right here, or I could also take the wood material and drag it on top of

an object over here in order to replace it. So those are the materials that are applied to an object inside of your scene. So you can use those starter materials in order to really kind of set up the way things are going to look. So another great example is let's say that you wanted to replace this with more of a Unreal Engine style grass material. You can drag that grass material on top of this as well. So there's other things you can bring in as well. So things like different props. So if you go into the props folder, props is just another word for assets that you can bring in. So for example, it's got a couple built-in things like rocks or if I wanted to bring in like this chair or something like that, I can drop that into my scene as well. And those are just going to work as objects that you move around. And then finally, let's say that you wanted to export an image from Unreal Engine. And there's a ton of stuff we would want to do in order to set this up before we uh.

finalize that. But let's say that we wanted to export some image in here. Well, what you would do is you would set up your camera so you can adjust things like your lens settings, other things like that. So, notice how the wider focal length is going to give you more of a view in here. So, your smaller focal length is going to give you a lower field of view in here. All right, so now real quick, I'm going to show you how to export a rendered image from Unreal Engine. I have no clue why they've made it this complicated, and hopefully they'll make it less complicated in the future. But if you do want to take an image, usually what you're going to do is you're going to use a camera like this one to get the view that you're looking for. One thing that might be helpful with this is you can right-click on it, you can go into pilot mode, and so when you go into pilot mode, what that's going to do is that's going to allow you to actually move around and drive the

camera so whatever you want your camera to see you can set this up so that it actually sees that in the view. And then once you're done, you can click on the button right here to stop piloting the actor. But basically what I've done is I've set up this camera so that it um sees what I want to render. You can create multiple different cameras, other things like that. But now what you have to do is you have to go down into this the import folder or wherever you want to put this. Then you need to add a level sequence. So in this case, this is going to be something that you find inside of animation. And you want to go down to level sequence. And again, no clue why there's not just a button that will allow you to render things, probably because this is more of a game engine. But what you do from there is you create that level sequence. Then I'm just going to double click on it, and I'm going to add my camera to this track. So in this case, it's going to be track actor to.

sequencer add cine camera actor. Okay. And so this is really set up to do more animations, right? Over this number of frames. Well, in this case, we don't necessarily want that. We just want to click this and drag it back to like zero frames or one frame right here because we just want a singular frame exported. Then I'm just going to right click and I'm going to under edit, do trim section, right? So it's going to trim everything to the right of this. So now what I've done is I've created basically a one frame animation right here. So I only have one frame of that camera in whatever location I select, right? And then once you're done with that, then you can save it and you can go up to window, cinematics, movie render queue. And what this is going to do is this is going to allow you to click on this drop down and pick that level sequence. And it's going to let you save it as an image to this folder. So usually I click on this folder so that it opens up, but then I click on the

button for render local, and what that's going to do is that's going to come in here, and that's going to render out images based on your camera location. Well, in this case, right, because I set this to like zero frames. If I go into that folder, it just exported one image like this. So, this is what your image is going to look like coming out of Unreal Engine. And obviously, there's a ton of stuff I need to fix in here and update from a materials standpoint, but that's a general idea of how you can import something from SketchUp and then create your first rendering inside of Unreal Engine. All right, so I'd love to hear from you. Do you want to see more Unreal Engine tutorials on SketchUp to Unreal Engine? It's a little bit complicated, but at the same time, the upside is really high. So, we may talk about this more if there's more interest. So, leave a comment below and let me know. If you haven't already subscribed to the channel, make sure that you do that. Help me beat Aaron.

In our competition, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to watch this, and I'll catch you in the next video. Thanks, guys.

Getting Started with SketchUp to Unreal Engine 5 - BEGINNERS START HERE!

This channel is dedicated to bringing valuable SketchUp lessons and tutorials to help people have fun with 3D modeling!

I started using SketchUp a few years ago while working at a general contracting company. I had used other 3d modeling programs in the past, and SketchUp immediately made an impact on me with its ease of use and its “fun factor.” While using other programs was a bit of a drag, everything I made in SketchUp was a lot more fun.

I started modeling things just for fun in my free time. I’d see a building that I liked and try to draw it in 3d, or I’d create a model of my living room so my wife could see what it would look like in different colors. Whenever I’m modeling in SketchUp, the possibilities just feel endless!

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