A quick guide on importing a textured model into the Crysis editor!
Here are some images from my experiment in importing a textured model from Sketchup into the Crysis Sandbox2 editor.


It was a little bit of a process figuring out how to do this initially, and some of the issues that I was having during Studio in completing this fairly simple task had to do with me rushing, and not considering my actions, though once I sat down and worked my way through the suggested work flow, everything worked as stated. All in all, including my time in class and time spent creating albums and writing this Wiki entry up, it took me approximately four hours of work. A reasonable amount of time for figuring out a major hurdle in the Crysis Environment Workflow. Now that I have done it a couple of times, I could create a model of similar complexity, and materiality, from scratch, into a new crysis map in no more than 10 to 15 minutes.

Process
I followed the instructions detailed by "ZapWizard" on the CryMod Forums, in a thread titled "Updated! SketchUp directly to SandBox2", at:
http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=19058&hilight=XSI+EXPORT

There are a few things you will need to set up first in order to make this work for you. You will need to install a few things in the following order:

1. Install "Python 2.5.4" (python-2.5.4.msi), which can be found at:
http://www.python.org/download/
2. Install the "Python File Format Interface" (PyFFI-py2.5-1.2.2-windows.exe), which can be found at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=199269&sel_platform=3089
3. Install "ColladaCGF" (ColladaCGF-py2.5-0.3.5-windows.exe), which can be found at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=235915&package_id=286549

You will also need to use an image editor that can create ".dds" image files. I used "Paint.Net", as suggested on CryMod, which I found at:
http://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html

You are now ready to go! About halfway down the first page of the thread titled "Updated! SketchUp directly to SandBox2", there is a post from ZapWizard that details this process as follows:

How-to:

-Install ColladaCGF - Which you should have already done by now
-Set the sketchup units to Meters under "model info"
-Make your model
-Texture it using proper sized textures. - Powers of 2 (e.g. 64x64, 128x128, 512x512, etc.) I used 1024x1024 pixels.
-Open the "Model info" and go to statistics, cllick "Purge unused"
-Export the model to using "Export to Google Earth" (Not upload to 3D Warehouse)
-Rename the .KMZ to .ZIP
-Unzip the files
-Goto /Model and right click on the model and convert it to a .CGF
-Move the material files from the /images folder to the same folder as the .CGF
-Open all the materials and save them as .DDS using Paint.Net or similar
-Open SandBox2 and import the model. - Put the whole unzipped folder into C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\Game\Objects, then find your object in the RollupBar using the "Brush" button under the "Browser" section.
-Open the model's texture file in the material editor
-Replace the .JPG links to point to the proper .DDS files
-Tweak the textures from there.

If you read through the entire thread on this subject there are many answers to problems that you may be having with the process, and possible alternate methods for importing objects from other applications can be found in other threads.

Jeremy


Thanks to amorilia, Seith and Zapwizard, from CryMod for their efforts and information on how to import from sketchup to Sandbox2.

-----

Workflow Extensions
Note that this entire workflow can be used with a different modeller so long as you can get things nicely into Sketchup. So if your package of choice doest have a sane process for getting into CryEngine2, then going via Sketchup is an option.