I've been looking at importing and rendering LEGO LDraw files into SketchUp for the last couple of days - This is what I've created so far...
Currently the process is quite complex and uses the following tools
LDRDAT2OBJ - http://www.pearse.co.uk/lego/links/ldrdat2obj/ - this works but flips the model upside down (easy to fix in Blender or SketchUp)
Blender (to convert from OBJ to COLLADA .dae - which is what SketchUp wants to import - the .3ds files that SketchUp also imports seems to get heavily triangulated which makes the stylised rendering look fairly bad)
And of course SketchUp!
This process is probably over complex (I know there is an LDRAW importer for Blender), but I have not seen many SketchUp rendered stylised LEGO images on the internet so I thought I would create some.
I also managed to create a small move in SketchUp (I'm not that familar with animation in SketchUp so it's fairly basic.)
Enjoy!
