Animation Export Problem

castromann

hello everybody!

i´m trying to export scene animations with sketchup8(osx) and run into some problems concerning the speed of the export.

the scene consists of mainly 2d face-me billboards (about 10-20) and some basic 3d models. i made something around 10-15 scenes with individual transition and delays. only the camera is moving. style is set to one of the built-in sketchy edges defaults.

although this model is very small the export of the animation (jpg, png or avi doesn´t make a difference) takes more than 5 hours (image size of export makes no big difference aswell). depending on the fps settings i talk about 88 to 200 frames. strange thing is that some frames render quite quickly as you would expect it and others take up to 60mins. i even investigated those frames but couldn´t find anything suspicious that could cause the slow export.

if anyone has an idea on what makes my export sooo slow or knows any tweaks/tricks, please let me know!?!
i know that sketchy edges rendering slows down the export, but this seems to be a little too extreme to be explained just with the rendering style, isn´t it?

thx for your help in advance!!!1

valerostudio

My experience is

Export as frames in JPEG and not AVI, compile the frames together later
styles and shadows will increase export times 10 fold - it's not unusal for a 30 sec animation to take all night to export with shadows on and 30 min with shadows off. I bet styles makes this even more taxing on your machine.
Dont sacrafice frame rate for a fast export. Dont go under 24fps.

Decide on if the sketchy style is worth it - maybe good ole line jitter will export faster?

castromann

thanks for your reply

i feared that this is how it is
i have no shadows turned on but need to have the sketchy edges exported. seems like i have to accept the long export times.

i have one one more suspicion though. as there are a lot of 2d faceme components in there i get the feeling that when the camera passes a 2d component in a way that it has to turn around its axis to stay faced to the camera the export of these "turning-frames" are the ones that take forever to export.

i will investigate that behavior and report back if i can find something significant.

again, thanks for your help!!!

valerostudio

I have exported a very detailed model with face-me and shads on (no sketchy style) and the thing did take a while to export 8+ hours. I just dont think it is uncommon for SU. Animation is a bit of a weak point for it.

castromann

i just tried a workaround with the trial version of the new keyframe animation plugin. though its intended for object animations it has a tween feature that automatically creates all the transition frames between scenes in a separate file with a specified framrate.

after creating the new file with all the tweened frames i exported the file again as an animation with transition and delay set to zero, which the plugin also does automatically.

sensational result: the animation export to png with imagesize set to full screen resolution took only 15min at 25fps. the creation of the tweens went nearly instant.

this is great, i think i will invest into this nice plugin. only downside, the tweening process ignored hidden objects in some scenes. i will have to see if i can find out why...