[Plugin] Smoothstep Animation

Whaat

Sorry for the delay in releasing this plugin. I've been on holidays and working on other projects. This plugin allows you to smooth out the jerky scene transitions in a SketchUp scene-tab animation. It is not intended for object animation, only native SkechUp scene animation. It cannot be used as-is to export to a rendering engine.

Usage:

Copy 'smoothStepAnim.rb' to 'Plugins' folder as usual.
Notice two new self-explanatory items under 'Plugins' menu
Plugin can export single frames only. The images must be joined into a movie format using other software (eg. VirtualDub)

Issues:

All scene delays must be set to 0.0 seconds
likely more lurking...I have not tested very thoroughly. Please post bugs.

Enjoy!

Dale

smoothStepAnim.rb

remus

Cheers,another interesting plugin form the great ideas factory (better known as you )

spence

Nice! I did a really quick test and it seems to work pretty good. I used Quicktime to create the image sequence.

princedragoncok

Been looking forward to this Will give it a test tomorrow. Thank you Whaat

bianhai

very good!
thank you , Whaat.

solo

Whaat,

Thanks mate, that works great, I may now try GSU animation again, as I stopped using it for the exact reason you felt the need to create this great plugin.

MALAISE

Thanks a lot, Whaat. I've just made simple test, pretty well smooth transitions.
MALAISE

matt77

thank you so much!!

this has been much needed in SU.

Many,Many Thanks

Matt

pilou

What is the file format of images exported?

matt77

Either Jpeg or PNG..

Ben Ritter

Whaat,

Thank you so very much,

Ben

jcdb

How do you set all scene delays to 0.0 seconds?

spence

jcdb,

Go to Model Info, under window, and then Animation, scene delay.

Pixero

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?

jcdb

@spence said:

jcdb,

Go to Model Info, under window, and then Animation, scene delay.

Thanks spence

Whaat

@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.

Jon

Thanks again, Whaat!

RickW

@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.

Unfortunately, there's currently no way to delete pages/scenes in ruby...

Pixero

Here's what Todd said at the Google Group:

@unknownuser said:

Sketchup.active_model.entities.erase_entities(page) should work, but
it hangs SketchUp. It's a known and reported bug.

To get around this bug, do this:

First, make the page you want to delete the active page. Then, issue
this from Ruby:

Sketchup.send_action "pageDelete:"

That means it can be done even if its a work around.

If not we could save the model prior to using the script and then saving it after, under another name or with a "_anim" after.
Not the best way but it would still mean we could render a smooth animation.

erikB

Thanks from me to Whaat, very much needed script !
greetings erikB