Animation Issues

hombre

Help.

I've got a model (SKP6 ) that I've tried to export as an animation, and though the animation works well, there are these horrible white streaks that flicker throughout the various components as one moves through the animation.

I've checked the SKP forum which had 3 pieces of advice for someone who had written about it already.

The bug has been fixed in 6 if you have the latest version. ~ I do, and it wasn't.
Save the file to SKP5, and export from there since the bug wasn't present then. ~ I did, but the rendered quality isn't as good.
Shut off hardware acceleration in Open GL/Preferences. ~ I did, and it didn't work.

Does anyone know how to remedy this, and if not, does anyone know if this bug exists in SKP7? I'm a little leery of upgrading to find out that the bug may still be there.

honoluludesktop

Hi, The bug has not been fixed, something about the camera crossing a light/shadow boundary. Anyway my work around:

Export the avi to WinMovie maker, and cut out the offending frames. Wmv file are smaller, you can add titles and sound.
Turn off shadows when animating interiors. My exteriors tend to be less problematic.
Avoid problem boundaries when setting up the scenes. Very hard to do.

hombre

Thanks for the info.

It is an interior, however I am not using shadows since the lighting is so primitive as to only include one source within Sketchup, which is obviously outside of the interior and so doesn't really work anyway.

I did however find the solution to my problem which happened to occur only on these columns which I had made into components. They are just a bit complicated and include to make it simple to describe, boxes, attached to the columns. What that produced was two parallel faces ( one on the front of the box, another on the face of the column ). The problem was that both faces were facing the same direction instead of being opposite. Once I eliminated that, the white oddball flickering and shape shifting went away.

Gaieus

Then it seems it wasn't the "wll known" shadow bug but the other "well known" flickering of Z-fighting faces.

hombre

@gaieus said:

Then it seems it wasn't the "wll known" shadow bug but the other "well known" flickering of Z-fighting faces.

LOLOLOL...yes you are correct, but I notice that 'well known' is in quotes.

It is easy to see the sort of 'flickering' that can take place when 2 planes occupy the same space, but in this case they were separated by a space. Given, the space was very small ( 3/8" ), nevertheless even though the planes did not contact one another, I had the problem. That makes me wonder just how far 2 planes need to be separated in order for this not to occur, or is there a limit at all when the 2 planes have faces which have the same facial orientation and are connected?

Curiously, the problem ONLY occurred in the animation export process, it did NOT show up in the 'real-time' walkthrough.

Gaieus

SU can only display things minimum 1 puixel from each other on screen. This means that if you place two faces 3/8" from each other but look at them from close enought for SU to "have enough pixels" in between, there's no problem.

Once you zoom out however and this 3/8" would occupy less screen real estate than 1 pixel, SU has problems displaying it and z-fighting begins.

A bigger resolution export surely helps and this is what probably happened here; your screen resolution must be higher than the resolution you exported the animation in. Am I guessing well?