V-Ray Beta 1.6 Animation Export Location?

Krisidious

Do tell Andy...

andybot

Kris,
The very first reason I started looking at Blender was in fact because of animation, and lack of controls thereof in Sketchup. Unfortunately, it's not a simple transition from SU to Blender. While it's a great program and I'm totally sold on it, it took me probably a year to learn it in my spare time to get to where I can actually produce with it. Now that I have it pretty well under control, it's worth every bit of effort I put into learning it. What I'm saying is that it takes some commitment, and it's not likely to pay off right away. No quick fix for your particular issues currently.
That said, here are the basic steps I would do to make something like you are trying to do in Blender.

I use TIG's very excellent .obj exporter plugin to convert my SU file to an importable format. In Blender, there's a "keep vert order" option for bringing in an obj file as one complete mesh. This is really helpful for something like a section cut where you would want to do a boolean difference between your house an a section cut.
Set up the animation by setting keyframes in the timeline. There is an actual camera in Blender that you can move around, lock to a path, aim at a target, etc. and that can all be keyframed ad infinitum. Super flexible, it's a joy to work with. There are advanced animation tools as well where you can control the speed, shift around keyframes, etc.
Add a cube to use as a cut plane. Set a boolean modifier function to subtract the cube from the house. Now move the cube into the house to where you want the section cut. Set a keyframe, move it to the final position, and set the last keyframe. Then go to the outliner and turn off the cube visibility. You can slide the timeline back and forth and see the cube slicing through the building.
set up lighting, materials, etc, and render the animation...

The biggest thing in getting Blender useful was to learn all the shortcut keys that I use regularly. For example "a" toggles selection, "b" gives you a selection fence. keypad "0" toggles between camera view and regular view, and so on. In any case, like I say, it takes some time to learn, but I find the flexibility the program offers is like a whole new universe of options after the many limitations of the Sketchup environment.

Andy

andybot

hehe, just catching up on some of the other posts here on Sketchucation... There's this that seems worth looking into:
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=53006

...though I have to admit, I didn't get very far with Thea because I felt the animation controls were just as limited as Sketchup. Now that I am working in Blender for animation, I just can't go back

dkendig

Blender is a fully featured 3D solution, not geared towards one particular market. Much like Max, Maya, etc. So yes, once you get past the learning curve, it's going to be capable of doing just about anything you can imagine... If you can manage to get past the learning curve

vosiley123

@andybot said:

also make sure you have the most up-to-date version - I recall there was a problem rendering animations in some of the earlier beta versions.

Hey! Do you know if the Jul 17, 2013 1.60.23 release support animations?
Kind regards

dkendig

we only support fly through animations at this time

halroach

I just installed the latest Vray 1.60.23412 Beta , and still no go for animations for me.

I set up two different scenes.
under render settings output tab:
I check to "save output" and I specify an output file name and location. C:/temp/1.png

I check on "animation". I checked "include fame number".

No go! I click on render, it goes through the animation quickly in sketchup and starts rendering. But it keeps rendering the same frame again and again, the camera isn't moving at all. What am I doing wrong? are you sure vray 1.6 supports animation!? I've asked about this before and haven't gotten a straight answer.

dkendig

The first scene gets rendered twice. So if you have transitions set to be 1 second, and you have your animation output set to 30fps, you will need to render 30 frames before you will see a change in camera position.

halroach

@dkendig said:

The first scene gets rendered twice. So if you have transitions set to be 1 second, and you have your animation output set to 30fps, you will need to render 30 frames before you will see a change in camera position.

No kidding!
My impatience may have been the problem all this time... I'll check that first thing in the morning!
Thanks!

dkendig

no worries, just try it out with a smaller value for fps in our render options, or the transition time between scenes in SU, just to make sure I'm not losing my mind (totally possible). Otherwise you'll have to sit there for a long time to verify what I said was correct.

halroach

You are correct!
The Animation Works!!! Yay!!!
Maybe you should have it mentioned somewhere that the first scene is rendered twice. Maybe there should be an option to enable or disable that feature?
Why actually do you have that? Is it for better transitions when doing compositing later?

@dkendig said:

no worries, just try it out with a smaller value for fps in our render options, or the transition time between scenes in SU, just to make sure I'm not losing my mind (totally possible). Otherwise you'll have to sit there for a long time to verify what I said was correct.

dkendig

there's no benefit that I'm aware of. I believe it's just a bug.