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I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
I'm really new at this and can use some help. Trying to lay out a commercial kitchen for our fire house and I need additional items.
I just purchased and downloaded this 3d Kitchem Model from cgtrader, with the expectation that all of the appliances and equipment in this file would be added to my Library, and that I could use any of the items in my kitchen plan. My intent was that I would be able to separately select individual kitchen appliances and move them about in my plan, but it just seems to be a locked file of "some" kitchen. It specified file formats of .dae, .obj, .3ds and others - but when I import the file, it's just the one locked file.
What am I doing wrong? Did I purchase the wrong type of product? Regards Peter
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
It depends on what you got when you downloaded the model. If what you got is a single .dae, obj, or, 3ds file, then yes, it's a single model of a full kitchen. That is also the idea I got when looking at the model pictures on cgtrader. The title also says "Commercial Kitchen 3D Model 3D model", suggesting that it's a single model. If you got a zip with multiple obj files (or dae/3ds) then you should have multiple models probably for individual pieces of furniture.
Depending on how the creator build the model you can possibly split out one or more parts of the kitchen. The easiest way to do this is to open the model in Blender and look at the parts list. It is probably a long list and by selecting one you can see what part it is. You likely have to select multiple parts that make up one of the pieces. If you can do that it's easy to export only the selected parts giving you just that furniture piece.
You can't do this in Sweet Home 3D because Sweet Home 3D can only show/hide parts based upon the material/texture, not the actual vertices from which a model is build.
Since you paid for this model you could ask the creator if he has individual models you can get, especially the ones you are specifically looking for.
P.S. If you download from a 3Dmodel site always download the .fbx file too if available. You can't open it in Sweet Home 3D but you can in Blender and sometimes it's better than one of the other formats. From Blender you can export it to one of the formats Sweet Home 3D does support. You sometimes have to try every format and which one gives the best result. An fbx import, obj export in Blender is sometimes better than the obj file you downloaded.
P.S.2. Don't expect a furniture library from any 3D model download site, it's a Sweet Home 3D specific format that is usually only offered on the Sweethome3D page on sourceforge or the Sweet Home 3D models page .
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[Edit 1 times,
last edit by Keet at Sep 23, 2023, 7:07:36 PM]
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
Well, I obviosly don't know what I'm doing. I downloaded & installed Blender, but do not know how to get any of the files in that zip file to appear. I tried dropping the .obj file into the work area but that did nothing.
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
First unzip, then from the menu import and choose the format you want to import. Browse to the file to open it. If you have never used Blender before you might be in for a nasty surprise because it's not the easiest program to use. Read 'easiest' as slightly sarcastic because I sometimes have the idea that the programmers deliberately made it an animal.
I don't use it very much anymore because Sweet Home 3D can do almost everything I need. The few things I do use: smooth surfaces like exported walls, slice objects, and split of or extract parts like I described you could do for your kitchen.
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
it's not the easiest program to use.
Wow! lol I'm still recovering from "menu shock". Is there anything out there that might be much less functional, but still allow me to split out and export the individual components as .obj files?
If not, I guess it's back to the YouTube tutorials, this time for Blender.
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
Is there anything out there that might be much less functional, but still allow me to split out and export the individual components as .obj files?
There is a way but it's a bit of work. On the other hand you'll learn how obj and mtl files work It mostly depends on how the object is structured internally but you would have the same issue in Blender too.
First make sure you have exported your kitchen from Sweet Home 3D. This is because Sweet Home 3D structures the obj and mtl files differently than for example Blender does.
If you open the obj file with a plain text editor (NOT MSword or other advanced word processor!) you will see lines starting with "g " followed by a line starting with "usemtl ". A "g " line is a part of the total object and the "usemtl " line after that references the material to use for that "g " part. Scrolling through the obj file you will see that multiple "g " lines have the same "usemtl " reference.
In Sweet Home 3D you can make materials invisible when you "Modify furniture". When exporting invisible parts will not be exported so that's a way to isolate a part from the complete object. Of course that doesn't work if too many "g " parts use the same material. It would noy only make parts invisible that you want to get rid of but also parts that you want to keep simply because the yuse the same material. So the trick is to get different materials for each "g " line. You can do that by changing the "usemtl " line by replacing the material name with a new unique name. Of course you need to add that material(-name) to the mtl file. Just copy a block in the mtl file and change the name to the name you added in the obj file. It doesn't matter what the actual material is, you can change those later, it's just to seperate into unique material names. First try it with just a few "g " and "usemtl " lines and after import see what it does. In Sweet Home 3D you will see the new names you added and the actual part ("g ") will blink in the preview. Sometimes it's a very small part or even hidden by other parts so you might not see some of the blinking parts.
Long story short, and here comes the big work: Give every "g " it's own unique material name and add them all to the mtl file. If you now import the obj file you will see a long list of materials in Sweet Home 3D BUT it gives you the option to make every individual part invisible and that allows to isolate only the parts you want. With only those parts visible you can export/import to get the separated kitchen applicance. Rinse and repeat for every part you want to separate as an individual object.
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last edit by Keet at Sep 29, 2023, 4:31:20 PM]
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
The super, super basic instruction in Blender: 1. Import your model. 2. Select it with left click in the 3D view. It should get an orange outline1. 3. Go into edit mode by pressing Tab. 4. Press 1 (number one, but not on the NumPad) to select by Vertices. 5. Select (left click) one of the black vertices (points) in your model. It should go white. 6. Press l (L as in letter) to select the linked vertices. Hopefully a discrete part of the main objects vertices should should go orange. 7. Press p and separate by selection to another object. 8. Select the new object and give it a sensible name. 9. Rinse and repeat.
You might want to separate multiple mesh parts into a single object. You can shift select multiple points on different parts to separate them into their own multipart mesh. Alternatively separate everything into individual objects, then select multiple object and press Ctrl-j to join them into a single object. You can also use many other tools (i.e. box select) to select points, but that's the basic principle and that should get you started.
The above gives you most control, but is slow and tedious. An alternative is to change 5, 6 & 7: 5. Press a to select all vertices in the model. All vertices go orange. 6. Skip this step. 7. Press p and separate by loose parts. This may or may not work depending on how this model is constructed and imported.
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Re: I may have bought the wrong thing :-(
Like I wrote:
First make sure you have exported your kitchen from Sweet Home 3D. This is because Sweet Home 3D structures the obj and mtl files differently than for example Blender does.
So after import in Sweet Home 3D export it and your obj file will look different. Sweet Home 3D creates a pretty clean obj file, in most cases much easier to "read" than other programs produce.
