Bringing My Old SketchUp Tanks to Life in Unreal 5.6

I’ve been modelling WW2 vehicles in SketchUp for over 15 years — mostly for Panzer Elite, and more recently for OSTPAK 3. But the truth is, most of my models have just sat on my hard drive, unseen and untested. Some are over 15 years old. It always bugged me.

So this year, I finally decided to give them a new home — not as game-ready mods, but as proper, lit, walkable 3D scenes in Unreal Engine 5.6.

🛠️ From SketchUp to Blender to Unreal

The biggest hurdle was finding a clean path out of SketchUp without breaking everything. I now export as .OBJ, clean up in Blender, and then export as .FBX into Unreal. It works. No weird scaling, no flipped normals, just clean geometry.

Along the way, I discovered Imphenzia on YouTube. His method for pixel-painting low-poly models really clicked with me — I now use a stylised WW2 palette and paint each face directly in Blender’s UV editor. No textures, no UV islands, just clean blocks of colour. Fast and satisfying.

🌱 Unreal, Not Unity

I originally tried Unity, but didn’t like how my models looked. Unreal gave me better lighting and a smoother workflow right away. Even just adding sunlight and shadow made my depot feel alive.

In just 9 days, I’ve:

  • Imported ~20 vehicles and props

  • Created a stylised fictional depot

  • Pixel-painted a Panther, Sherman, Matilda II and more

  • Switched to 3rd-person cam and added stylised grass

  • Stress-tested 32× Pz IVs — still hitting ~140 FPS

  • Used no fancy lighting tricks — just Lumen and clean meshes

I’m not building anything, other than, I just want to walk among my own models, show them off, maybe drive them one day. This is about giving them somewhere to live.



“How it started ⇢ How it’s going”

If you want the proper blow-by-blow with screenshots and notes, it’s all here on my Forumotion thread:
👉 https://panzersim.forumotion.com/t492-murkzs-workshop-sketchup-models-in-unreal

#UnrealEngine #SketchUp #WW2 #PanzerElite #SoloDev #LowPoly #PixelPaint #3DModeling

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