[Plugin] Smoothstep Animation

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.

fredo6 · 31 Jan 2016, 21:58

Thomthom,

You're right. This is a rather significant undertaking!

I working on animation plugin lately, but still far from completion. As you described, It uses a visual timeline and is purely parametric (i.e. not based on the Sketchup Scene animation mechanism), so that you can freely change the object transformations at any point.

Below is a short video capture. The UI has changed a little bit since then, but this gives an idea.

Fredo

cotty · 31 Jan 2016, 22:01

WOW! I especially like the exploded homer

ntxdave · 31 Jan 2016, 22:12

OK - now "the cat is out of the bag"

I have wanted to hint about this before.

thomthom · 31 Jan 2016, 23:38

@fredo6 said:

I working on animation plugin lately, but still far from completion. As you described, It uses a visual timeline and is purely parametric (i.e. not based on the Sketchup Scene animation mechanism), so that you can freely change the object transformations at any point.

!! whoa! Yes! Like that! I like that!

I also like how you did the timeline vertical to save viewport space. I'll be closely watching this!

(Btw, from a technical point of view, do you use .move! when animating?)

JQL · 31 Jan 2016, 23:47

Split this topic at once! This is the S-Bomb!

Grice · 28 Feb 2016, 07:27

Hi Whaat, good to hear from you!

Absolutely there is demand for your plugin; I use it quite a lot. The other flythrough plugins around require you to create spline camera paths and generate multiple tween scenes that force you to save multiple copies of your model... this becomes a major nuisance when there are design changes. And don't get me started about the face-me component artifacts when using SU's base animation exporter...

There are 3 issues with the Smoothstep plugin that are a bit of a problem for me at the moment:

1 - When generating frames, at certain points the time to generate a single frame can suddenly blow out dramatically. I have attached a sample file. If you just generate the animation using the standard settings, at frame 33, you'll notice that SU seems to freeze. When generating this animation in Full HD, that particular frame took my computer 2 hours and 52 mins. It is not obvious what causes this problem but possibly something to do with face-me components coming into view. Happens on both my PC and Mac.

2 - There is a small jump when the SU changes over to the next scene. Very small but still noticeable.

3 - If you exclude some scenes from the animation by unchecking the "include in animation" checkbox, those scenes are excluded but a whole stack of still frames are added to the end of the animation. This just means that you are rendering stuff unnecessarily and you often have to force close SU to stop it which isn't ideal.

I love your work and as I said, I'm willing to donate to see that some of these small bugs are fixed.

Grice

BuddhistTemple-Test.zip