[Plugin] Smoothstep Animation

Grice · 3 Oct 2012, 08:12

Whaat, many many thanks for this and the person who replied to my post solving my little artifact problem that the programmers appeared not to be interested in fixing. Great script!

FS · 21 Dec 2012, 09:03

how to install on mac..?

driven · 21 Dec 2012, 23:16

@fs said:

how to install on mac..?

same as any .rb files & theres lots of info on this forum.
download from the first post in this thread, move to 'plugins' folder
if it's hidden you can paste this into 'Ruby Console' under 'Window' menu in Sketchup

`open "/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/SketchUp/Plugins"`

, then hit return/enter
drag the ruby in and restart SU.
john

Gadgetguru · 21 Jan 2013, 00:44

thanks for the brilliant plugin!!

using Proper Animation, Smoothstep & Adobe Lightroom and getting an excellent video
is there any chance of adding support for exporting TIFF files?

thanks

pritishgajjar · 20 Aug 2013, 08:09

@pixero said:

Thanks for a great script.

Would it be possible to add an attribute to all the existing scenes in the model that they are "keyframes" and then add scenes for every frame in the animation with an attibute that they are "inbetweens" and add scene transition times according to your smoothstep script.
The script should then be able to delete all the "inbetweens" if you want to change the animation but leave the "keyframes" intact.
I believe this would make it work with external renderers.
What do you think, is it doable?

dear sir ,
i m pritish from india , trying to render animation with vray can you make tutorial or may be some image/video format to explain your thoughts,it will be helpful .
waiting for your replay.
thanks in advance.

regards,
pritish

Grice · 9 Oct 2013, 04:30

I have been using this plugin for a while but have been running into a few problems, particularly on my PC (Mac to lesser extent). When generating frames, sometimes the frame generation can hang for a considerable amount of time. Standard frames will take a minute or two and then there will be a rogue frame that takes 20mins! Sometimes even as much as an hour! This ain't good. Seems to happen more at HD resolutions. It makes video generating times completely unpredictable.

Some sort of feature to universally number frames so that the animation can be stopped/started or "farmed" to other computers without messing up the frame sequence would also be fantastic.

I know this plugin was written a while ago but I am just hoping Whaat that you will relook at it again because it is a very useful script for my line of work...

duanekemp · 8 Jun 2014, 19:57

I see that the flow of additions to this post has slowed down. However, I've just read everything from the very beginning and curious if there is any further development on allowing this to work with rendering soft and plugins.
I have searched SketchUcation, Google and spent too much time looking for an answer to the question that too many are asking. How to make smooth animation from SU scene camera positions. I have seen Rendering programs make smooth camera position transitions but cannot find the plugin that makes this an automatic feature for animation exports from SU. Here is an example of non smooth camera positions and I'm looking for the trick that avoids these choppy positions between camera points. Could this plugin one day help?
I'd like to render animations with Thea and think this is really close to what we are looking for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded%26amp;v=NM978cZSj8c

sally · 9 Jun 2014, 12:18

@chris fullmer said:

Quicktime all the way. It works fast and does a very good job.

Hi Chris, do you mean Quicktime pro? And can you add still photos in between video clips or would you need to import the quicktime edited video into iMovie and do that in there? Thanks, best regards, Sally

randomizer · 17 Jun 2014, 20:31

Hi,

Can it be that exporting animations via write_image is slower than using regular export?
Currently I am writing the connection to RenderPal, our renderfarm manager, and it seems that using this method for exporting is taking much more time.

I observed that when using the the regular export, the 3d ui is completely paused. Maybe this might speed things up? But I was not able to pause it myself. Did not find a ruby function for that.

Hope somebody can enlighten me a bit.

Greetings
Andreas

Jim · 17 Jun 2014, 21:40

What file format are you using? What anti-aliasing and compression options are you using? Both of these can slow the export.

randomizer · 17 Jun 2014, 21:43

For both tests I used the same options. PNG and 1.0 compression. Anti aliasing also turned on.

Perhaps the problem is, for write_image() Sketchup has to create the frame twice. Once for the ui to make the geometry visible including all shadows and stuff and another time when exporting the image. If that is the case then it would be good the have the possibility to shut off the ui during animation export.

duanekemp · 26 Mar 2015, 12:31

@whaat said:

@pixero said:

Thanks for a great script.

Would it be possible to add an attribute to all the existing scenes in the model that they are "keyframes" and then add scenes for every frame in the animation with an attibute that they are "inbetweens" and add scene transition times according to your smoothstep script.
The script should then be able to delete all the "inbetweens" if you want to change the animation but leave the "keyframes" intact.
I believe this would make it work with external renderers.
What do you think, is it doable?

That's a cool idea and definitely doable! I'll do some experimenting.

Whaat, was the experimentation on Pixero's suggestion a success, completed or has further development continued?

This quote above is exactly what I'm interested in finding more about.

I've tried proper animation to set up the basics of movement, then used those scene to create keyframes and those frames can be batch rendered. However, that's allot of work without the smoothing here. I'm thinking that Pixero's idea would resolve allot of conflicts.

What is the newest news? Has this been continued on a newer, more current thread?

Whaat · 26 Mar 2015, 17:55

@duanekemp said:

@whaat said:

@pixero said:

Thanks for a great script.

Would it be possible to add an attribute to all the existing scenes in the model that they are "keyframes" and then add scenes for every frame in the animation with an attibute that they are "inbetweens" and add scene transition times according to your smoothstep script.
The script should then be able to delete all the "inbetweens" if you want to change the animation but leave the "keyframes" intact.
I believe this would make it work with external renderers.
What do you think, is it doable?

That's a cool idea and definitely doable! I'll do some experimenting.

Whaat, was the experimentation on Pixero's suggestion a success, completed or has further development continued?

This quote above is exactly what I'm interested in finding more about.

I've tried proper animation to set up the basics of movement, then used those scene to create keyframes and those frames can be batch rendered. However, that's allot of work without the smoothing here. I'm thinking that Pixero's idea would resolve allot of conflicts.

What is the newest news? Has this been continued on a newer, more current thread?

Hi Duane, I'm afraid that there are no plans to continue development of this script.

duanekemp · 27 Mar 2015, 05:59

That is sad news to hear. With so few resources for animating in SketchUp, this looked like a tool that would help bridge the gap for convincing presentations.

Thank you for responding. I appreciate that.

Grice · 20 Jan 2016, 17:11

I know this is an old one but I use this plugin a lot! It is so simple to use and does not have the face me component artifacting issue that occurs with the standard Google/Trimble animation export. I flagged this many years ago if you track back through this post, but Trimble are obviously not interested in fixing it. As Duanekemp mentioned, there are so few simple but decent walkthrough plugins available and I am worried that one day this one will stop being compatible with a new version of SU.

I don't know if Dale (Whaat) is still around but one thing I noticed and would love to have fixed is the little jump you get when transitioning from one view to the next. You can see it my video here: https://youtu.be/RyRShpSTtLg

Also while generating images, it tends to put a stack of still frames on the end of the animation. I'm no coder but these items seem fairly minor and surely not too hard to fix.

I'd go so far as to say that I would be prepared to pay [highlight=#ff0000:crn1w7rw]money[/highlight:crn1w7rw] (and I am sure others would too) to have some of these minor things fixed.

Dale, if you are out there, we'd love to hear from you!

duanekemp · 24 Jan 2016, 10:53

Adrian, I've shared your video in the GSG FB page.
Very well done, considering the tools available.
Bravo.
Here's the link.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2211754875/permalink/10153839592159876/

Grice · 30 Jan 2016, 06:47

Thanks Duane, yes it is not easy with the currently available plugins. I won the commission to design this building complex based on an earlier similar presentation. There is definitely a market there for a decent yet simple fly-thru plugin.

Whaat · 30 Jan 2016, 23:01

@grice said:

I know this is an old one but I use this plugin a lot! It is so simple to use and does not have the face me component artifacting issue that occurs with the standard Google/Trimble animation export. I flagged this many years ago if you track back through this post, but Trimble are obviously not interested in fixing it. As Duanekemp mentioned, there are so few simple but decent walkthrough plugins available and I am worried that one day this one will stop being compatible with a new version of SU.

I don't know if Dale (Whaat) is still around but one thing I noticed and would love to have fixed is the little jump you get when transitioning from one view to the next. You can see it my video here: https://youtu.be/RyRShpSTtLg

Also while generating images, it tends to put a stack of still frames on the end of the animation. I'm no coder but these items seem fairly minor and surely not too hard to fix.

I'd go so far as to say that I would be prepared to pay [highlight=#ff0000:2l6232yt]money[/highlight:2l6232yt] (and I am sure others would too) to have some of these minor things fixed.

Dale, if you are out there, we'd love to hear from you!

Hi Grice,

Nice to see that this little plugin is being used professionally. I wrote it a long time ago mostly as a little experiment and haven't touched it since. I will consider doing an update sometime this year though, especially if you feel there is still some demand for this plugin.

db11 · 31 Jan 2016, 17:33

@whaat said:

I will consider doing an update sometime this year though, especially if you feel there is still some demand for this plugin.

That would be great news! I concur with Grice that there is a need for a good, simple animation plugin.

thomthom · 31 Jan 2016, 18:18

I've wanted to set up an object-animation extension for a while. (Alas never had time, and probably never will ) One where you have a timeline window and you control the transformation of objects. There appear to be interest among render engines to support this if someone created it.
Seeing how popular Skatter has become - filling in the need for proxies, I think an animation extension would also be of high demand. Even if it only animates instance transformations.