Sketch-up:

From the export menu, select .FBX and export your file to your Maya project folder.

Maya:

Import Your file into Maya.

As of right now there is a small bug with the FBX exporter that confuses the scale of the imported file.  The workaround for this is to turn on "Scale Working Units" On the FBX import window, and set "Convert to" to cm, with a scale factor of 1 (default).

Default settings for all other options are fine.

Import the file.

Once you have your file imported into Maya, Turn on your textures be pressing the "6" key on your keyboard. (NOT the numberpad)

Once verifying that you're textures were imported correctly, Turn them off again by pressing "5" and viewing your model with a simple gray shader.

First Step, Adjusting Normals:

When a model is built, often times faces that are designated as "Inside the model" Or inner faces will end up facing the outside.  If a model with this error is brought into Virtools, these backwards faces end up black. (Or various other texture anomilies) In order to fix this, you need to edit your meshes "Normals."

Display > Polygons > Face Normals

Doing this turns on the direction the faces of your model's textures, What you should see are Green Lines facing outward from the center

of the individual faces.

Should any faces have this line facing Inward, You need to go to "Face Mode" (Rightclick Hold, Face. Rightclick Hold, Object Mode to return to regular manipulation) Select the faces that have these backward facing normals.

           One thing to concider, when looking at these inward/outward normals, is how you expect a person will be viewing your model.  If you have a room made up of planar walls, with their normals facing outward, the inner walls will recieve no light, or be black. But turning those normals inward will make the outer walls black, or unable to recieve light.  

Once selected Navigate to Normals > Reverse > [x]

In the reverse normals window make sure "Only Selected faces" is checked, then click Reverse. If your model is made up of multiple meshes you have to do this for all seperate meshes. Once all your normals are facing the correct way, it's time to Triangulate.

Drag Select your entire mesh.

Mesh > Triangulate

Doing this will turn all of your quad meshes into Triangles, a format that is easily read and understood by virtools.

Stacked verticies. When modeling an object you often get extra faces and vertexes stacked on top- of each other, making a file larger and slower then it needs to be.  The best way to fix this is to view your model in vertex mode and then merge (Edit Mesh > Merge) vertices together, ridding your model of stacked vertecies and extra faces.

Time for Lights!

Lighting a 3D scene is a process that some people can dedicate their entire lives to. But we're going to simplify the process and only use three lights.

The best lighting option (at this point in time) for a Virtools scene is Directional lighting.  

So in Maya, Go to Create > Lights Directional

A new directional light appears at 0,0,0.  Once it appears, Press "7" on your keyboard.  This view allows you to see what your scene looks like with lights. Both the maya Workspace and Virtools you the same Rendering language, so if you can get your scene looking good in the Maya Workspace, it will look the same in Virtools.

Select your light again and then on your toolbox, select 9th tool button from the top. this allows you to move you're light and control

what direction it's pointing.

Once you have your first light placed, Duplicate your light (ctrl + d) and move it so that it lights from another direction, and at the same time, reduce the intensity to .8 in the attributes window. (ctrl + a)  Duplicate your second light and move it so that it lights your scene from below, lower the intensity to .5 for that light. This creates a 3 light system that will ensure there's no areas where light does not reach.   

Once you have all your lighting set up, your model triangulated and checked all verticies for stacking, Export your model out to virtools using the virtools exporter.

 The Default settings for Virtools will be fine for a straight Geometery Scene.  Once the export is finished, Open Virtools and bring in your freshly exported file using a "Import File" Option, rather then an "Import file as".