Animation in SketchUp

Pixero

I'd say it's unsolved.
Yes it's limited but just look at what great modeling tools have been made by the community. Who would have thought SU would have such great tool two years ago?
Surely animation could be enhanced as well if only we get started doing it.
A good keyframe editor is a must for better animation control.
I've managed to use Fredos splines scripts to make some advanced camera paths, and it works but is very unintuitive and it's hard to make changes. Coming from Maya where almost everything is animatable, and where you can even connect a texture to drive the animation, SU is rudimantary.
A keyframe editor combined with something like in my last link above is as far as I have come in my ideas.
Also the tour tool in LightUp is a great way to record animation. Now if we could have that combined with Chris Fullmers record camera script and a way of editing these keyframes by manually dragging point or entering values. Suddenly animating in SU would take a big step forward.

(Note: I'm talking about camera animation here since I belive that is the most important and where we should start. Object and texture animation could follow after that.)

thomthom

I don't think it's unsolvable. but, it's a crazy amount of work. there are so much missing.

Chris Fullmer

I keep trying to outline in my head what would be needed as a bare minimum, and I keep coming back to thinking that a timeline editor would be the first important thing to create. Would have to be a web dialog. And it would show the keyframes for whatever the user has selected I think. Then you could link a camera to path and then use keyframes to position the camera along the path and then edit the speed of the camera.

That is poorly described, but it would be cool to see something major like this undertaken by a community of coders.....(not like I have time or animation experience)

Chris

Whaat

Creating the core of the animation plugin is not even that hard. I think the reason that no one has ever done a complete animation plugin is the huge amount of work necessary to create a good UI. If it wasn't for the complex UI required, I probably would have taken a crack at it by now.

thomthom

@whaat said:

Creating the core of the animation plugin is not even that hard. I think the reason that no one has ever done a complete animation plugin is the huge amount of work necessary to create a good UI. If it wasn't for the complex UI required, I probably would have taken a crack at it by now.

Would that be Webdialog UI or viewport UI?

And I think there's another questions here. Are we talking about animation that solely works in SU - or a system render engines would be able to take advantage of?

Chris Fullmer

Presumably one that renderers could take advantage of. But something this complex would require renderers to tap into this code I believe. A complete connection could not be established through "scenes". I would guess this would need an open API for renderers to use.

Jim

Just out - SUAnimate released a new version 3.1 - it's looking nicer all the time.

http://www.ohyeahcad.com/suanimate/

MartinRinehart

@pixero said:

I'd say it's unsolved.

Good.

@pixero said:

A good keyframe editor is a must for better animation control.

What is a "good keyframe editor"?

@pixero said:

Also the tour tool in LightUp is a great way to record animation.

What does this do?

@whaat said:

no one has ever done a complete animation plugin [because of] the huge amount of work necessary to create a good UI.

What would be needed? Can you doodle one?

@chris fullmer said:

I keep trying to outline in my head what would be needed as a bare minimum, and I keep coming back to thinking that a timeline editor would be the first important thing to create.

Can you doodle one?

chrisglasier

@martinrinehart said:

... Can you doodle one?

Always questions ... how about putting forward your own ideas?

MartinRinehart

@chrisglasier said:

Always questions ... how about putting forward your own ideas?

At present I'm extending my SketchTalk Move command from

m comp, vector

to

m comp, vector, nsecs

The latter moves the component in the specified number of seconds. Small stuff moves smoothly at 25 fps. Working on a queue-based system so you can specify consecutive moves:


# flight.rb

new
bp = i '/models/biplane'
none

for i in 1..5 # taxi, speeding up
    m bp, [10*i, 0, 0], 1
end

for i in 6..10 # takeoff
    m bp, [10*i, 0, 5*i], 1
end

This is underware in need of outerware.

Chris Fullmer

I think this is the middle wear of a very layer outfit. If you look at other systems that do animation (3dsmax is my only minimal experience), there is a timeline and everything ties into that timeline. I can't help but think that the timeline is more or less the base layer that needds to be put down.

Pixero

@martinrinehart said:

@pixero said:

A good keyframe editor is a must for better animation control.

What is a "good keyframe editor"?

Something like this: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=8547#p51051
If you need more detailed information just ask.

@martinrinehart said:

@pixero said:

Also the tour tool in LightUp is a great way to record animation.

What does this do?

You fly around in the model in realtime and can record that motion to numbered images to make an animation in some video program. The camera has inertia so you get a very smooth flowing animation, a bit like with a steadycam.
I've made an example animation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MiW5c7tn_Q

If we had that combined with Chis Fullmers record camera script we could have a exact match between a sketchup animation and a LightUp animation making it possible to have a SU styles sketch turn in to a SU lines animation turn into a fully LightUp rendered animation.
If we could save the motion and turn the camera positions per frame* to a spline we could edit it to adjust minor camera move mistakes instead of having to remake the whole flythrough.

*You'll have to work with per frame since that is the only way to have accelleration and decellerations in SU since SU only can do linear interpolations between scenes. (Thats why SU animations look so stiff and unnatural.)

chrisglasier

I think I must be one of few who are interested in animation for analysis. Maybe there are others around here? I think these things need to be aired if we want to really use IT to enhance our performance rather than just titillate.

So, for example, instead of having a chart for a production flow or building process you run an animation using the same start and duration data. Positioning data could come from any number of sources but I see the main point as separating the movement of objects from the movement of the camera.

The latter is of course pure Sketchup but the rest I am sure should be via its web dialog so that people who are not modelers can also take advantage of animating models for their own analyses.

Chris Fullmer

There is no need to separate camera animation from object animation though. It should be regarded as any other object, able to be animated and controlled via the same keyframes, key locations, path contraints, etc that should be available to object animation.

Its just the web dialog UI that is a daunting task.

chrisglasier

@chris fullmer said:

There is no need to separate camera animation from object animation though. It should be regarded as any other object, able to be animated and controlled via the same keyframes, key locations, path contraints, etc that should be available to object animation.

I can make objects rotate and move. I put some examples on YouTube some time ago. As you will know now it is blocked here, so I can't provide the links. Tags include Sketchup and nameset.

No key frames were involved, and I remember I could manually pan, zoom and orbit whilst the animation was continuing; that's why I see them as separate.

@chris fullmer said:

Its just the web dialog UI that is a daunting task.

It takes a lot of my time but will get there in the end.

miikka1978

I have been following different animation solutions (plugins and extensions) for Sketchup and I think that Sketchers Studio is the most advanced one. Anyway, they seem to have it only for Mac.
http://sketchersstudio.com/en/

Chris Fullmer

That looks like a program that does animation outside of SU, it just lets you import SU models. We're talking about an actual animation toolset inside of SU.

@Chris - I remember you already have things animated in the past. I thought it was very cool when I saw it. In that respect, of being able to control the camera while the animation plays in the viewport, I agree. There would need to be a way to choose if the user is in animated camera view mode, or in regular SU view mode. Most modelers handle this by creating an actual camera object (much like the film and stage plugin). You can then animate that physical object. Then you could choose to set the viewport to be looking through that camera, click "play" and you would see the animation through the animated camera lens. Or choose to exit out of that camera into regular SU free cam mode, click "play" and you could watch all animated elements dance around, including the animated camera object, that is not being looked through.

That is how other programs handle that I am aware of, and it is very succesful. Then you can create multiple cameras and animate them differently, export the rendered movie through various views. Even change the camera in the middle of the animation, so it is like cutting to another view like movies do all the time.

But all this is dependent on having a way to visualize the animated objects in their animation paths, and alter their paths of animation easily. That is the point of keyframes. You select an object, put the timeline onto frame 1. Record a keyframe for the selected object. Then it knows exactly where it stands at frame 1. Then move the object to where you want it to be at a later frame. Maybe 5 seconds later. Put the frame onto frame 150, record the keyframe for that object and then the animation software interpolates all locations that the object will pass to get from frame 1 to frame 150. To edit the animation, you highlight frame 150, the object jumps to that location, you move the object to where you want it, re-record the keyframe and voi-la, the animation is updated.

Its just a visualization techinue that makes animation easier to comprehend than pure xyz locations and vectors, which is a very rigid way to animation an object. In the end the software just needs to remember the xyz position and that is all it records, but keyframes help the user enter that data into the software.

Gee I get excited thinking about it. It would be fairly easy to implement most of this over components and groups by animating their transformation matrix. But animating raw geometry is hard because SU does not keep objectID's across SU sessions. So it is very difficult to keep large amounts of data attached to raw geometry. It requires parsing the entire model and rebuilding that data each time the model is opened. Yeah, wow animating vertices is a monumental task...

Chris

chrisglasier

I am just suggesting animation can be another multimedia report machine-generated from the same data or criteria used for locating components and making Gannt and PERT charts ... as opposed to animation created with key frames for a video. So it would need to be restricted to animating components.

For example, an animation of constructing a building over a year could be examined over different time periods and spans and react to input of data relating to start, completion and suspension. It only becomes fixed when the data is fixed - maybe never, if the model is passed on for use by the building owner.

MartinRinehart

@chris fullmer said:

Its just a visualization techinque that makes animation easier to comprehend than pure xyz locations and vectors, which is a very rigid way to animation an object.

Actually, it's a very flexible way to animate (tho maybe not so user friendly). Here's the actual flight.rb that did my first taxi/takeoff. Note the acceleration in the first ten seconds and the climb in the next 30 seconds.


# flight.rb

n
bp = i '/models/biplane'
none

for i in 1..5
    m bp, [2*i, 0, 0], 2
end

for i in 6..20
    m bp, [8, 0, (i/3-2)], 2
end

When I first "flew" my biplane, I stood at the origin and watched it fly away. Later I moved out to just before the end of the flight. A little spec took off from the airport; turned into a biplane as it approached and damn near hit me at speed. Very scary! Think Hitchcock.

I'm abandoning my Timer class (UI.timer-based, but Java-like, with start() and stop() methods and a Runnable object) because I want to have several things (including the camera) animated at once. Multiple timers will probably eventually get out of synch. It lived for less than 24 hours after it's first use. Sad.

I'm writing a Conductor class. Any object wanting to animate must register (before time 0) with the conductor (pass a reference to a callback) for a specific time interval. During that interval the conductor (again, UI.timer based, but only one timer) will pass frame ticks back to the registered object(s). What the object does is not the conductor's problem. (If your stupid anti-virus program starts a full scan in the middle of your animation, all animatees will be slowed together but will still be in synch.) Will fit very well with a timeline-based keyframe approach.

I loved Pixero's detailed UI design. Does anyone else have even a sketch? How about SketchUp as a UI modeling tool? How about a 3d UI? How about 3d camera(s) that you position/move around your model?

chrisglasier

Somewhere amongst Martin's Uncle Holly speak you can find something sensible but contorted like: "During that interval the conductor (again, UI.timer based, but only one timer) will pass frame ticks back to the registered object(s)." This is better explained somewhere I can't find at the moment, but it's important. Will post again when found.