Hi, I would like to ask for help regarding Blender and Sketchup, which are the primary tools that I am using to make all these assets.

However, due to my lack of skills, I am being limited and cannot make higher quality and realistic models. Thus, I am hoping that if you are reading this and you have good knowledge on those tools, you can give me some tips/guides which may go a long way for me!

I will outline my issues/limitations with Blenders and Sketchup and if you have tips for them, please feel free to share!

1. Complex curves: the maximum I can do is to intersect curves with another curves on 2 (maybe 3?) axes, which cannot approximate real-life shapes and curves. I see people making really nice models in the 3D warehouse in sketchup, but do not know how I could achieve that with the free version.

2. Baking of textures in Blender: I can now put plain materials in sketchup, import it into blender, and bake all of them in one texture. But, I cannot put complex image as materials and do the same, because when I combine the meshes and then bake it in Blender, the resulting texture will be messed up (the image loses its positions). This is a huge issue because my workaround method is to manually add the decals and so on later, after generating the baked texture. (and that sucks because I don't trust downloading image editors like Paint.net and GIMP because their official sites don't have direct downloads and they seems to refer you to somewhere sketchy for it, and thus, I am using Powerpoint for now! And, Powerpoint tends to make fine details blurry somehow.)

3. Blender material colour issues: In sketchup, a material may be dark grey (charcoal) in colour, but once in Blender and then made shadeless (so I can generate the baked texture), the colour become much faded (charcoal becomes grey). This issue makes the model go off-colour and it will just appear bad in game. I haven't manage to find any setting I can use in Blender to prevent that...

Thank you!