Flightpath2.rb

Fletch

I am using Flightpath2 I bought with the presentationbundle2 from the smustard friends... it's like the 'Super Friends'... only in ruby format.

Anyway,
how do I get the pages created to transition smoothly? They jump and stop, jump and stop, jump and stop... and when I change the transition speed for my scenes, they don't change with it.

http://www.smustard.com/script/PageUtilities2
in the scene timing dialog in my skippy, there are too many scenes and I can't get to the scenes on the bottom... argh!!!!

I temporarily excluded most scenes so I could see in the web dialog the ones I needed to change.

%(#BF4040)[This doesn't work for getting rid of the flightpath2 scene delay times...
grr... is it a bug?
"A value of -1 reverts to the global values set in the Model Info dialog box."]

2myChaGrin

I had the same problem with too many scenes for the dialog box. A script fix to add a scroll bar should be in order. What you can do is go to the first scene and hold shift while pushing the tab button. Do this until you get to the end where you can save your scene info. This is an unrelated issue to the flightpath plugin though and I'm not sure why you are having a jumpiness. My guess would be something to do with the difference between the Feet per Second the camera is traveling and the transition time. Play around with both settings and you should find a happy medium that flows smoothly.

CadFather

jumping here too

page delay set to zero, threw virtually anything at it but still pauses between scenes

Fletch

Hi chagrin,
thanks... it was obvious, and I already did that but thanks for the assistance! The point that it needs a scroll bar was why I posted it.

I got an email from Rick saying that you can also right-click the window of trouble and hit 'refresh' and it should help... but didn't try it.

More importantly, I ran a tiny test to see if the animation problem was an OpenGL thing, or if it will indeed be smooth when I render the .avi... and it is smooth when you render it out

Only, what if I want to show them in SU live with OpenGL? This still needs to be fixed... hopefully Rick will find the time to fix it... there must be a better way to achieve good SU animations w/out all this fussiness.

The main prob. I saw was that after using the Flightpath script and the scene timer script, no matter what I did I could not get it to give me a smooth animation in OpenGL.

sadly, this is unacceptable for me, as I give presentation to my arch. clients using SU, not just .avi.

They love watching the SU in action. "Oh, do that again... and oh, can you go back a second, now rotate it up a bit... oh, great!" "What if it were taller?" Then I go... click click - 'like that?' "Yeah! Wow, you're amazing"... and I say 'aw, shucks...' but I digress...

RickW

There is an internal issue with webDialogs that cause them to lose their scrollbars. Usually, right-clicking in the window and selecting "refresh" or "reload" (or the appropriate similar menu item) will cause the scrollbars to reappear.
Unfortunately, there is no way for ruby to improve SketchUp's display performance (at least not that I have found). When exporting the animation to a video file, the transitions will be smooth and the page delay times will be appropriate to their settings. That is as good as it gets. Sorry

Fletch

Hi Rick!

I guess my question is why it seems to mess up my ability to add a 'normal' scene after using the flightpath script.

I will try to figure out a way to 'convert' the FP2 cams to 'regular old SU cams'.

What would be good, maybe, is a simple tool just like FP2, but that does not try to set the transition time, delaty times, etc... just puts in cams at the target and interval specified, then one could apply and tweak the SU native scene transitions and delays?

RickW

Not sure what you mean when you say you can't add a "normal" scene after using FP2. What is a "normal" scene? What happens when adding a scene that causes you to make this statement?

Just trying to understand...

RickW

PS - In an (obviously failed) attempt at avoiding confusion like has happened here, this note appears on the FP2 page:

@unknownuser said:

Note: Regardless of the accuracy of the settings made by this plugin, slideshows in SketchUp are always dependent on computing power, and may not display smoothly due to the overhead of calculating the views of the model in real time. The smoothest results will always come from exporting an animation.

How could I have explained it differently?

Fletch

all my scenes were playing smoothly inside of SU.
then I ran the FP2 script to create a 'better' cam path (instead of SU's natural 'pillowing' or 'arcing' effect for the cam transitions)

After that I ran the scene timing script... trying to eliminate SU from stopping on each frame.

2 things occured.

while it exports smoothly as an .avi, it plays stop-n-go in SU
next time I tried to add some SU cams moving along another are of the same model, they were stop-n-go, instead of playing smoothly.

Fascinatingly...
I opened the file the next day, and the transitions were smooth even with the scenes that were stop-n-go the previous day.

I don't know what to tell you, Rick. It's completely unpredictable.

I am running SU on a very hi-end graphics card and have 3Gigs of Ram... so am very confused.

halroach

@fletch said:

all my scenes were playing smoothly inside of SU.
then I ran the FP2 script to create a 'better' cam path (instead of SU's natural 'pillowing' or 'arcing' effect for the cam transitions)

After that I ran the scene timing script... trying to eliminate SU from stopping on each frame.

2 things occured.

while it exports smoothly as an .avi, it plays stop-n-go in SU

next time I tried to add some SU cams moving along another are of the same model, they were stop-n-go, instead of playing smoothly.

Fascinatingly...
I opened the file the next day, and the transitions were smooth even with the scenes that were stop-n-go the previous day.

I don't know what to tell you, Rick. It's completely unpredictable.

I am running SU on a very hi-end graphics card and have 3Gigs of Ram... so am very confused.

Hi,

I have noticed that animations within SU are smooth and quick, until I start checking and unchecking layer visibilities for each scene. Sketchup 'hiccups' when it has to load or unload layers between the scenes.
Could that be what you were experiencing? Does anyone else have this problem?