Properties to save between scenes

Pout

Ok, but that's duplicating the entities, which i really want to avoid at all costs

TIG

Sorry, but changing materials of one instance across scenes is not possible unless you make duplicates , then vary their materials and use layers in the scenes to control their visibility - it's just not a function of Sketchup !

MartinRinehart

@pout said:

Ok, but that's duplicating the entities, which i really want to avoid at all costs

Add my vote. Would really be nice to have a blue ball and a red ball without having two otherwise identical balls.

RickW

It MIGHT be possible using an observer. I've used Scene observers to trigger animation of objects (very rudimentary animation), so it might be possible to use them to (re)paint objects.

Chris Fullmer

Dynamic components re-color objects. You can't do anything very detailed as far as texture placement, but you most certainly can use ruby to re-color objects without having to duplicate the object.

Making scenes rememeber the material attribute might work using Rick's idea, and it might not. But you could re-write your own scene manager that could remember color settings.

Would it be painful to write? Probably.

Chris

Pout

@rickw said:

It MIGHT be possible using an observer. I've used Scene observers to trigger animation of objects (very rudimentary animation), so it might be possible to use them to (re)paint objects.

Using scene observers works like a charm to do it. BUT, and for me this is a big BUT, the scene observer has big disadvantages:

does not fire when creating an animation
does not fire in Layout
is gone if you close and reopen a model

So, when i want to create a movie, i'll need to write a complete script which saves images along a path between two camera views and then look for some external library which can create a movie of all these images and using Layout is impossible

Maybe there is some plugin already available with some of this functions available

Chris Fullmer

My camera recorder writes images to the disk to make a movie from. You can use mencoder, a command line driven movie encoder, to turn those images into a movie. Or imagemagick. I do not think anyone has put all that into a single script yet. Its on my list of things to do with my camera recorder script, I've just not quite gotten it done yet.

Pout

Chris,

Great plugin! Do you think it can be used like this:

get all camera settings of all scenes
create a path from one camera setting to the other
execute a rb function (already written) with camera viewpoint of first scene
capture the movement along the 1st path (like your script does)
upon arriving at the camera viewpoint of the second scene: execute a rb function
capture the movement along the 2nd path (like your script does)
upon arriving at the camera viewpoint of the third scene: execute a rb function

and so on

In the end: Write all that to images (like your script does)

combine into movie (i'll check the mencoder to see how to fire this from ruby)

Chris Fullmer

Yup, that is all definitely possible. Writing the images to disk is not all that hard. It would be quite easy to make a script that exports animation frames from scene to scene, and executes a ruby method at each scene.

Does onyone out there know how to re-creatae the exact flythrough path though? Is that what you are hoping to achieve Pout? I have not ever figured out how to do that, but I think it is possible because it seems like some of the renderers are able to re-create SU's camera paths.

Chris

Chris Fullmer

Pages.show_frame_at

I think that answer's my own question. I would guess that is how the actualy flightpath created by SU is re-created. It would be easy then to export images from scenes - recreating the actual SU flightpath, and then compile those into a movie (presuming you get mencoder to cooperate).

Chris