Animator and Thea

fredo6 · 18 Sept 2016, 21:24

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

ntxdave · 18 Sept 2016, 22:38

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.

ntxdave · 19 Sept 2016, 17:06

@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.

adrihal · 28 Oct 2016, 17:37

What it is necessary to make that the panel render has appeared

mistrik1705 · 16 Mar 2017, 05:48

Good afternoon. Question: for the third time faced with such a "bug", when recording the animation somehow miraculously (in this example, the handle, half thread on the facade, and a few facades) pulls back, and not one distance. What I cant? I attach the SU file in the 2017 version of the file of the Animator-a video clip in a little slow, but the staff in the archive + so a couple where you can see the "bug". https://yadi.sk/d/FJDqsrkP3FwHcd

fredo6 · 16 Mar 2017, 21:03

Konstantin,

There are known problems with Thea when called from Animator (e.g. DIRECT method). From time to time, Thea does not notify Animator when it has finished rendering a frame. There is a timeout set in Animator (3 times the duration of processing for the last frame), but this may lengthen the whole animation rendering quite a bit. The video attached took thus 2h25, while it should have taken probably 1h30 normally (I had to convert the original MP4 of 1540x620 into a smaller GIF file because the file size is limited to 2 Mb in this forum).

As an alternative, you can use the REVERSE method, that is Thea processing the animation. The small inconvenience is that the animation rendering generates a sequence of image files which you have then to stitch in order to get a video (with VirtualDub (free) or QuickTime Pro (30$).

Basically, do NOT launch Animator, but instead

open the Thea Render Window in your model
setup your rendering method (best is IR Presto (AO)
Go to the Tab 'Animation'
Select Animator in the plugin combo box
Press the 'Render Animation' method
This displays a dialog box (controlled by Animator) where you can choose the Film and a few other parameters.
Then you are prompted with a File panel to select the directory where Thea will generate the image files. You need to create and select an empty directory.
When you press OK, Thea will start rendering the animation, frame after frame.

On the model, it took 2h30 to generate all images (my laptop has an integrated Intel card, so not a Gran Turismo GPU!)

Fredo

fredo6 · 17 Mar 2017, 09:04

@adrihal said:

What it is necessary to make that the panel render has appeared

You just need to install one of the supported rendering software.

TheaRender v1.5
AmbientOcclusion Ex, v1.9.5 and above
SketchFX Ex, v1.0.6 and above
Twilight Render Pro, v2.5.5 and above

Then the button(s) will appear automatically.

You also need to download and install FFmpeg, following the instructions.

Fredo

fredo6 · 21 Apr 2017, 09:59

For info, an update of Thea Rende 1.5 is published today.

It should include a fix avoiding or minimizing the timeout situations (many thnks to Tomasz Marek).

Also the next version of Animator, v1.6, will include a more efficient management of time out situation if they still occur.

In the meantime, I could generate the rendered animation of the model by Mistrik1705, here attached as a Mov file.

Film 1.mov

Fredo

Treadshot A1 · 25 May 2017, 09:45

Qucik question: does Thea render support changes to Layer Visibility in animations? It works fine with natural rendering in the example below, but the sword parts don't show in the Thea version.

*For the record, there are 4 swords, positioned for the car mode and jet mode. The sword components are different for each pair (in Outliner, it shows 2x <car_sword> and 2x <jet_sword>), so that each component definition can be on a different layer (main robot model is layer0, then layer_car_sword and layer_jet_sword are turned on/off as needed). Animator starts with [Layer0 ON / layer_car_sword OFF / layer_jet_sword OFF].

Also, Thea or otherwise, is layer visibility able to be faded in/out? I'm not aware of a way to change component opacity with basic Sketchup functions (aside from transparent materials), not sure if that can be achieved in a plugin. Would be nice to have so parts don't just pop in and out of existence.

tomasz · 6 Jun 2017, 08:52

When you render from Animator plugin the visibility will be used, because it re-exports each animation frame. There is no option of fading the visibility in/out though.

If you render same animation from Thea animation tab, then the visibility will not work. This happens, because Thea4SU does everything to convert the animation to Thea's native animation which doesn't support visibility yet.