I've been having horrible luck with this new process,initially it seemed to be a GREAT way to import the files, but the more i work with it the less useful i'm finding it.
I think many of my problems are based on the fundamental fact that most of the sketchup models i'm recieving are based off of autocad linework, (and piss poor autocad linework at that)
now, the problem with this is that the direction of the original line that is extruded was drawn is what indicates which way the normal is facing in sketchup (assumption)
fine, crappy, but whatever, I can deal with flipping faces for the added benifit of keeping materials and groups in my translation.
the *GIANT* problem i'm having is that while the face normals are flipped, i can theoretically FIX that, but what i can't seem to fix is the VERTEX normals. which dont seem to respect any sort of sense.
Attaching some demonstration screenshots.
This unfortunately is playing hell with some of my shaders! most common would be vraydirtmap, but it doesn't play nicely with any of my realtime normal mapping work either.