Animation in SketchUp

MartinRinehart

There are a lot of animation-related plugins. Is this a solved problem or do they proliferate because animation is still an unsolved problem?

thomthom

Don't think they provide a complete solution. More like niche solutions or workarounds in various areas. There's still lots to be desired when it comes to animation in SU.

remus

Personally, i think the problem is that animation is such an incredibly complex area that its very hard to get right as a plugin (and really needs to be written in to SU as a whole.)

Pixero

@martinrinehart said:

There are a lot of animation-related plugins. Is this a solved problem or do they proliferate because animation is still an unsolved problem?

I'd say there are very few animation related plugins compared to the huge amount of modelling plugins availible.
Animation is one area where SketchUp really is waaaaay behind the competition. Animation i SU is rudimentary at best.
I have posted quite a few threads on the subject.

Here are a some of them:

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=8547

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=20173

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=19772

P.S. Martin, have you checked your PM's? I PM'ed you in another matter a while ago.

MartinRinehart

@pixero said:

Animation is one area where SketchUp really is waaaaay behind the competition. Animation in SU is rudimentary at best.

I followed the links you posted with great interest. I'm wondering if this is because the animation problem is unsolved or if it's unsolvable? Wish I knew what an animation product should look like.

(And thanks for the reminder re PM.)

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.

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(www.ohyeahcad.com)

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.