Is using Sketchup to create models okay?

gcewing on 2011/02/10 02:43

While we're on the subject of legalities, I've been working sporadically on a library that I'm currently calling Smidgen, which stands for Sketchup Model Import Driven Game Engine. It's built around a scene graph specifically designed to match the structure of 3D models created by Google Sketchup.

The snag is that, while there is a free-as-in-beer version of Sketchup, it's not open source. Also it's only available for MacOSX or Windows, not Linux, although reportedly it may work under recent versions of Wine.

The game engine itself will be fully open-source, and Sketchup will not be required in any way in order to play a Smidgen-based game. Developers, however, would need to use Sketchup to create models for a game or work on existing ones.

How would people feel about that?

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Comments

richard on 2011/02/10 04:05:

I only require that the resultant game be open source and that you have permission to redistribute the art assets with the game. There's no restriction on where those assets come from, or how they're created.

nitrofurano on 2011/03/26 20:15:

i think that also wise would be if these resulting models openable in software-libre tools, like Blender, exporting to formats like Maya's .obj (which is a simple text format, without any kind of obscurity), Blender's .blend, etc..

as well, some libre typefaces seems to be made on proprietary software like Fontlab or Fontographer, instead of Fontforge, and this shouldn't be an obstacle for the freedom of the stuff we do..