Animator and Thea
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Check the most recent beta version, please.
I have just uploaded it. -
Looking forward to see what you guys come up with........
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@tomasz said:
Check the most recent beta version, please.
I have just uploaded it.Nope, worse now, this time it does one frame and if you interrupt it crashes SU.
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Okay, works well using the Thea render animation, still an issue when using Animator-Thea.
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@solo said:
Okay, works well using the Thea render animation, still an issue when using Animator-Thea.
To help the ignorant, does that mean you rendered with Thea and not with Animator? I saw your post in the gallery
Wish I could try that with a couple of my models. I would share them with you for trying but some of them are not as clean as I know your models are.
Does Thea allow you to set materials, lighting, and etc.?
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Yes, I used Thea animation tab to do the render, funny thing is it's faster than using Animator option, may just be the time between frames that is shorter but does seem significantly faster.
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That's why animator provides support for the two methods, Direct and Reverse, and why Tomasz implemented the Reverse too.
The main difference is that when Animator calls Thea, Thea renders as if it was a standalone request, and therefore build an internal representation of the model. In batch mode from Thea, I guess caching and other optimizations can be done, because Thea knows that this is an animation.Fredo
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Does anyone have any comprehensive examples of Thea with Animator?
Yes, I have seen the one with the fork lift and the couple of examples that Solo posted. I am finding it hard to find some really good examples of Thea with any type of animations done with SketchUp. Would like to see how it compares with animator and some of the other renderers.
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Hope someone can give me some advice here. I installed the trial version of Thea to see how it would work with Animator. Well, the results were not very successful.
- First I tried one of my car wash models and got no where at all.
- Then I created a very simple animation. Took the default screen and added a box to it. Then I did a very simple animation with Animator by translating the box 5 feet alone the red axis. I set the time of the animation to 2 seconds. Simple enough right.
- Next step was to start up Thea. I then went to the animation tab and set the Plugin to Fredo's Animator.
- First render was generated by clicking on the Render Animation button. The render took 32:12 seconds and generated 50 frames. Since Thea does not natively create a movie (it created 50 png images), I then used Microsoft Movie Maker to create the movie with each frame set to a duration of .04 seconds. OK, other than the watermarks (which is standard for a lot of trial versions and I am OK with that).
- Next I rendered the animation using Animator. This time the render took 34:26 and generated 51 frames (mp4 format). I thought that was fine and then I went to play the animation. OUCH! I got the following error message and cannot play the movie.
Hope someone can give me some insight into I might have done wrong and how to move forward.
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Dave,
Which video format did you generate?
Can you also check the size of the video file.
Anyway, it look strange that the generation of 51 frames took 34 seconds (or 34 minutes).If you have time to post the model, I may try to reproduce.
Fredo
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@fredo6 said:
Which video format did you generate?
mp4
@fredo6 said:
Can you also check the size of the video file.
Well - this is the problem which I should have noticed before. It is 0 bytes. I should have checked that.
It went though all of the normal steps and I did not even look at the file size. So then the question is why did I wind up with a 0 byte file?@fredo6 said:
Anyway, it look strange that the generation of 51 frames took 34 seconds (or 34 minutes).
It was 34 minutes.
Here is the skp file. Again, this is so simplistic that it almost is not a valid test.
Animator Test 1.skp -
I think it is a matter of size. Dimensions in X and Y must be even (due to a limitation in ffmpeg).
Normally Thea correct the dimensions to be even, but there may be an issue somewhere.Also, when you generate, let a few frames generates and then press the button Preview to see if you get something playable.
Fredo
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I tried again and got the same results. This time it took 33 minutes.
I then tried clicking the Preview Video button after it created 3 frames. It did not show me the video but when I looked in the folder, there were 3 images.
Since this is the trial version, it will not allow me to control the size of the image. I tried setting it to 800x600 but it still attempts to create the video at 1301x708.
Hope there is some way to resolve all of this so that I can give the product a fair evaluation. I have tried to email them a couple of times but have not gotten any responses and I cannot participate in their forum because I do not have a license. I have not idea how long the trial will last (that is one of the questions I have tried to ask).
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Can you try to set even dimensions in Thea itself.
Fredo
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@fredo6 said:
Can you try to set even dimensions in Thea itself.
Fredo
I did try that but the trial version generates the images at 1301x708 no matter what setting I attempt. Apparently there is no way around that with the trial version. I think I read something about that in the user manual as well.
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Can you demaximize the Sketchup Window to see if the default dimensions do change
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@fredo6 said:
Can you demaximize the Sketchup Window to see if the default dimensions do change
OK - That worked (somewhat). I got the image size down to 960x720 and it took just under 27 minutes. However, my model almost goes off the screen. Other software I have seen it just reduces the size of the image but contains all of the model. I will do some additional testing (maybe tomorrow) to see if I can control this better. This potentially could have a very negative impact on my models.
At least we have some better understanding of what is going on.
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I think the issue is just for the trial version where the dimensions are limited by Thea if they exceed a certain size. The problem is that Animator has no control over nor knowledge of these limited dimensions, and since the images are generated by Thea, they may therefore be generated with odd dimensions. FFMpeg has a problem to process such image files, whatever is the command line I use.
Fredo
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Yes, I did some more testing by changing the size of the viewport in SketchUp and it seemed to work OK. This does seem to be a limitation of the trial version.
I wish there was a way to control the viewport size in SketchUp. Would be an interesting plugin.
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@Fredo, Thanks to your tips in email, I am back on track and continuing to test/evaluate Thea with your plugin. Long way to go though.
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