How to : 3D Walk-through of model

Sp0ngeWorthy

I'm new to sketchup (about a week) and I've been using it to build a 3D model of the interior of a new office I am building. I'd like to be able to do a true "walk through" of the model once I am complete the but the built in walk through tool is, let's admit it, barely even passable. I was hoping that one of you might know of a plug-in or even an external app that could render the model and allow a true walk through so that I can get a human perspective on the interior as if I was really standing in the model.

Any ideas or is this simply not possible?

solo

Welcome to SCf.

Okay lets break this down, you need to do a rendered animation of a walk through right?,SU does not do 'rendered' animation, for that you will need to use a rendering app.
Have you ever rendered before?

xrok1

there are quite a few you can export to, i like hypercosm for the web http://www.hypercosm.com/products/teleporter/sketchup/index.html or walkabout3D for stand alone http://www.walkabout3d.com/

Gaieus

@solo said:

Welcome to SCf.

Okay lets break this down, you need to do a rendered animation of a walk through right?,SU does not do 'rendered' animation, for that you will need to use a rendering app.
Have you ever rendered before?

Just to avoid some confusion - Pete (solo) is talking about "photorealistic" rendering here. What SU (or actually any graphics program) does as an output is also called "rendering" (as it renders the bunch of vector and raster data as a compound, visual image/animation on scren).

Now if you take Walkabout that xrok mentions above, it will more or less use the SU render style (materials, the only Sun as light source and such) although AFAIK some aditional things are included (like water reflection?) and create a walkthrough in FPS mode. It can even "render" a "real" 3D effct walkabout (you know the kind when you use those red and green glasses).
It has a trial version (otherwise not free) so you should give it a try I guess.

For those who know what I'm talking about: I wonder if models with Adam's LightUp plugin could be exported into Walkabout... If so, that could indeed create some very exciting results.

honoluludesktop

I use SU animation in my work for next day presentations. If you have a PC, this is an example of a exterior study for a house, and [url]later[/url] is an interior video for a small renovation. I had some flashing shadows (bug in SU code) in the interior video, but I cut the bad frames out for the final production.

They are constructed by saving scenes, then exporting the animation. Use SU to see the sequence, but save at a minimum of 24 fps. Space the scenes to accomplish the desired transitions time from one to another (insert or delete scenes as necessary). Use 0 delay time between scenes, and duplicate scenes where you want a pause to occur.

The animation is created in SU (unrendered) then the avi file is ported into WinMovieMaker for titles and editing. Nothing fancy, but does the job for me.