cool, what's up guys, Justin here with the SketchUp Essentials.com. So, in this series, we're going to talk about how to take a model from SketchUp, move it over into Unreal Engine, and start creating renderings from it. So, this will be a multiple part series where we talk about everything from exporting your models to setting up your lighting and your materials, and then also adding some context models, things like that. So, if you have any questions, feel free to leave them down below. Let's go ahead and just jump into it. Okay, so we're going to be using this 3D Warehouse model. It's the container house from, I'm not sure how you say this properly, but from this author right here. And you've probably seen it in a bunch of different videos because it looks really good when you render it out already. But we're going to go ahead and bring this in. And so, what you need to do is you need to have an extension for SketchUp installed called Data Smith. What Data Smith is going to do is it's

going to allow you to integrate with Unreal Engine, so the Unreal Engine can actually read what's contained inside of your SketchUp file. And so this one's a little bit odd in the sense that I don't think it's actually contained on the SketchUp Extension Warehouse. You have to actually download it from the Epic Games website. And so you can find the Datasmith extension by going to unrealengine.com. And I think you can just type in forward slash Datasmith, but I'll link to this in the notes down below. And you basically want to scroll down, and there's an option in here for Get the Plugins. So when you click on Get the Plugins, notice that there's a bunch of different plugins. In this case, you want the Unreal Engine SketchUp Pro exporter. And what you want to do is you want to download this. And I believe this comes with an .exe or an .MSI file. And you just want to run that. And that's going to install that in your SketchUp. And so once you install that in your SketchUp

you do want to make sure that you've gone into the extension manager, and you want to make sure that you've enabled Data Smith. And let's see, yeah, it's down below. It's actually in here under Unreal Data Smith. I'm not especially worried about it being unsigned. Remember that you can set your loading policy in here. I have mine unrestricted. I can link to a video down below where I talked about this a little bit more. So you may want to be a little bit careful. You want to may want to set this to approve unidentified or something like that. I'm not really concerned about it because I trust anything that's coming from Epic Games. But anyway, you want to make sure that you have that installed. Okay, so next step is you want to make sure you have the Epic Games Launcher and Unreal Engine installed. And so you can get that by going to unrealengine.com. And over here on the right hand side, there's an option for download. And what that's going to do is that's going to download the Epic Games

launcher. So you want to download and install the launcher. And then when you open it up, it's going to look something like this. And specifically, we want to make sure we're in the Unreal Engine tab. And you want to go over into the library settings right here. Now, you can either install if you have Unreal Engine installed. You can access the different versions of the engine that you have installed right here. If you want to install it, you can click on the plus button right here. And then you can find the version that you want to install. So in this case, I already have 5.1 and 5.2. So they're not showing up on this list. I am suggesting that you install whatever the newest version is, 5.2.1. You just want to make sure that that um, that Datasmith extension is going to work along with that. But then once you're done with that, you just want to click on the button for launch. And so what this is going to do is this is going to pop up the Unreal

project browser. And what you do with the Unreal project browser is you use it in order to create and manage your different projects. So in this case, you can go with something like architecture. So there's a couple sample files that you can bring in, right? So this one's kind of a template that brings in examples of exteriors and interiors. There's a design you can configurator. Really, the one that you're going to want to bring in is you're going to want to bring in this blank project. And basically, this one is set up for you to use Datasmith in order to quickly import those models. But what you want to do is you want to find that folder, right? So you want to put these wherever you have space. Note that these files can get kind of big. And you just want to name that. And so in this case, I'm going to select a blank Unreal project, and I'll just call this container house render and click on create. So when you do that, what that's going to do is that's going

to create an Unreal Engine project that you can then import your model into. This actually comes in pretty fast. It may come in slower depending on your computer, but for me, it actually opened pretty fast. I think partially because I don't have any starter stuff in here or anything like that, so it's very simple. But what that's going to do is that's going to pop you into the Unreal Engine window that looks something like this. Depending on the version, it may look a little bit different, but you're going to be pretty close to this. Notice how it's a little different than SketchUp in the way that your navigation works. So if you want to look around, you click and drag either your left or your right mouse button. If you want to pan, you click and drag the middle mouse button. So it's a little bit different than your SketchUp stuff. Scroll to zoom still works, other things like that, and then you move around the WASD keys kind of like you would in an actual game, right?

can use that in order to navigate around this three-dimensional space. But let's go ahead and let's bring in our SketchUp file from SketchUp into Unreal Engine. And so in order to do that, what we can do is we can click over here under this Quickly Add to Project. We want to go to the Datasmith function, and we want to click on the option for direct link import. What that's going to do is that's going to allow us to use the direct link from our SketchUp model and bring this in. Now, a couple things that I like to do before I import. First off, I like to hide anything I'm not going to use. Right? So I'm not actually going to use any of these trees that are in here. So I'm just going to come in here, select them, right-click on them, and hide them so that they're not showing up inside of my model. I might also delete out my default model, or maybe I'll just move it so that it's actually standing over here.

always hate deleting out that Bonnie model so we're going to go ahead, and we're going to move this over here, and I think we're pretty close now. I do kind of wish looking at this terrain that it kind of continued a little more, so what I might do really quick is just use the move tool and copy mode, and then I'm just going to use the flip tool in order to flip it. Then I'm going to move this back over here like this, so now I've just got a little bit of additional terrain in here. We may have to add a little more a little later. We're not going to worry too much that for right now, but um, I think our model is pretty much ready to go. So before I do this, what I want to do is I just want to make sure that I've saved my model, but our Data Smith direct link is already ready to go, right? It's already reading that because we have the uh, we have the Data Smith extension installed over in SketchUp, and so we're going to

go ahead and select this. Click on select. Notice how it gives me an error message. Let's just jump back over into SketchUp and just click on the option for sync or synchronize with direct link. So now let's try this again. There we go. And so what it's going to do now that that's linked up, now that I clicked on the sync button, it's going to ask me where I want to put this data Smith content. Now, this is basically asking where we want to put the model information and the material information and everything having to do with this model. Now, in this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to right-click and I'm going to create a new folder. And I'm just going to call this container house. I kind of like to keep all of the SketchUp stuff contained in its own folder right here. So we're going to go ahead and click on OK. And then it's going to ask us what we want to import. In this case, I generally leave this with everything checked like this.

really no reason I wouldn't want to bring any of this stuff in right now. So we're just going to click on the option for import. And so notice how that's going to bring in our SketchUp model just like this. And so now we've got our model in here. Well, if we take a look at it, notice what this does is this brings this in with all of the individual parts and pieces. That is one thing to be aware of when you're working with Unreal Engine and the way that it reads SketchUp files. Is if you look at this right, it kind of maintains the grouping that was in here. So all of your groups and components that were in here all get brought in as separate objects. Notice how I can move these around. I don't usually recommend doing that just because it's really easy to get things kind of off in space. But notice how you can edit and adjust these objects and move them around inside of Unreal Engine. Okay, so one other thing I want you to know is if you click down

here into the content drawer section right here. Remember how it asked us to pick a folder? You can find all the things associated with this model in this folder, right? So, it brought this in here, and notice how it's got a folder for all of the geometry. So, notice how it brought in all of these pieces of geometry separately, right? These are basically all of the groups and components that were in the model, but it also brought in the texture files, which are basically the images that are associated with your textures, as well as it created materials for them, right? So, like this wood floor material, there's translucent glass. It actually created Unreal Engine materials for us in here so that we can start editing them and applying them, all right? So, leave a comment below, let me know if you have any questions about this first step. I know this is pretty simple, but just getting this up and running could be a huge hurdle. In the next video, we're going to talk a little bit about how to set up our materials inside of our model.

if you have any questions, feel free to leave them down below. As always, thank you so much for taking the time to watch this, and I'll catch you in the next video. Thanks, guys.

SketchUp to Unreal Engine PART 1 - MODEL IMPORT!

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