[Plugin] Smoothstep Animation

Whaat

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

@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

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

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.

Animator Early work 2.gif

Fredo

cotty

WOW! I especially like the exploded homer

ntxdave

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

I have wanted to hint about this before.

thomthom

@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

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

Grice

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

andre_64646464

no eh podido descargar nada

facer

Spanish:
no eh podido descargar nada

English "Google Translation"
eh not able to download anything

fredo6

@Grice

There is something weird in the style of the model that makes Sketchup freeze when views are changed by program.

This is true for the native animation, whether Play or Export Video. This even happens when you change scenes manually.

I notice the same behavior when building a fly-through animation based on your scenes with Animator. Sketchup seems to block and freeze at certain transitions, which makes the generation quite long (I cannot attach it here as it is too big, but I can post it on YouTube if you are OK).

Anyway, the model is useful to me for Animator, as it shows that Animation should be edited with simple styles, using complex styles only for generation of videos.

EDIT: I investigated deeper this problem of freeze:

for some frames, and inexplicably, write_image can take more than 2 minutes
this seems to be related to the watermark
This has nothing to do with the face-me components

Fredo