Panoramic or other output with "proper animation"

[Al Hart]

We are looking for a good way to create and display interactive animations.

We have found that Panoramic Images can create good interactive views of many interior scenes. But we would like to find a similar interactive viewing capability which works with object animations as well.

Not an animated movie, but something where users could change the view and animate objects as well.

Have any of the users of SketchUp animation plugins found any good interactive presentation options for the end products?

[KXI System]

Well I say Chris's screen recorder plugin is out, but its still very useful.

I remember reading somewhere about using a renders recording or something... I'll get back to this as soon as I remember. By the way, theres other animation plugins other than proper animation (no offense), I use mover and hope to improve it someday.

I'm just wishing a ruby guru (or more) can make an animation plugin thats covers everything and can export easily, so far sketchyphysics is the closest but I'm still waiting.

I'll try to come back to this when I can.

[Al Hart]

I didn't mean to offend (by mentioning a specific animation plugin).

I presume most animation plugins create movies. But we are looking for other solutions.

We know that some 3D PDFs can create object animations as well. Are there any 3D PDFs (whether create from SketchUp or another source), which provide a good solution?

[DavidBoulder]

You can create an array of cameras that rotate around a point where your object is. Then export to jpgs, and you can use 3rd party software to turn into an object movie that users can navigate. You could create a single row object where it just spins, or an multi row one that lets the users tilt up or down.

[DavidBoulder]

You can create an array of cameras that rotate around a point where your object is. Then export to jpgs, and you can use 3rd party software to turn into an object movie that users can navigate. You could create a single row object where it just spins, or an multi row one that lets the users tilt up or down.

[Al Hart]

@davidboulder said:

You can create an array of cameras that rotate around a point where your object is. Then export to jpgs, and you can use 3rd party software to turn into an object movie that users can navigate. You could create a single row object where it just spins, or an multi row one that lets the users tilt up or down.

That sounds like the technique for 3D Warehouse 3d views. But, unless I am not understanding what you are suggesting, you can not interactively move the camera off of its track, and there is no provision to animate the object in the scene.

[DavidBoulder]

That is true, you can't move the camera off it's path, but if you do a multi-row one, the viewer can look at it from any angle, or at least within a few degrees, depending upon how many cameras you set up. Then you could also set up the viewer so they can zoom in to see more detail in an area.

But your camera is still stuck on a sphere looking in towards the center. Pretty much the exact opposite of a panorama where you camera is at the center of the sphere looking out in any direction.

[Al Hart]

There was an earlier thread about using O3D for panoramas:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=23742

O3D lets you spin around geometry quickly. The panorama thread maps a 360 degree panoramic image to the inside of a sphere and then lets you view it.

However, O3D would also let you animate geometry in a 3D scene, and would presumably be fast because it (reportedly) uses hardware acceleration to view the model on web pages.

But I don't knof if anyone has tried this with SketchUp models.

[chrisglasier]

This post and topic may be of interest.