Sketchup Animation Path Shape

dburdick · 2 Dec 2010, 20:12

I'm trying to figure out exactly how Sketchup builds animation paths when moving from one scene tab to the next. It looks like some sort of spline or bezier path formulation is used. It's definitely not a linear path interpolation. Check out the link which shows a quick side-by-side comparison of a Sketchup animation (left) and the same animation in Vue (right). The Vue animation was constructed by taking the camera positions from each Sketchup scene tab and creating a linear animation between. Any thoughts or suggestions on trying to make the Vue animation match the Sketchup animation?

http://www.skinvue.net/Vue9/AnimationTestcompare.mov

Chris Fullmer · 2 Dec 2010, 23:39

How does VUE set up its animations? With "keyframes" between camera locations, and then you apply a linear or bezeir transition? I do not know if you will be able to accurately recreate the camera path that SketchUp uses. But you could export the camera location at each frame, effectively makeing each frame a key frame with a linear transition betwen them.

The ruby API allows you to get the camera object for each frame of its animation. So I would guess that the best way to do what you're looking for is to have the user input the desired frame rate inside of SU, then export the camera location per frame to VUE and have VUE then set up the camera path frame by frame.

Chris

solo · 2 Dec 2010, 23:56

I do not have a clue how to help but can say I like where this is heading.

Chris Fullmer · 3 Dec 2010, 00:49

How do you animate a camera in VUE solo?

solo · 3 Dec 2010, 01:09

There are many ways to do this, you can either use the wizard or key based.
It's pretty much a curve based animation tool.

dburdick · 3 Dec 2010, 06:16

@chris fullmer said:

How does VUE set up its animations? With "keyframes" between camera locations, and then you apply a linear or bezeir transition? I do not know if you will be able to accurately recreate the camera path that SketchUp uses. But you could export the camera location at each frame, effectively makeing each frame a key frame with a linear transition betwen them.

The ruby API allows you to get the camera object for each frame of its animation. So I would guess that the best way to do what you're looking for is to have the user input the desired frame rate inside of SU, then export the camera location per frame to VUE and have VUE then set up the camera path frame by frame.

Chris

Thanks Chris. You confirmed what I thought. In Vue, you can create linear or curved animation paths. It appears that Sketchup uses some sort of arc-like movement when the camera is rotated around the scene. I like your idea of capturing intermediate key frames - I'll give this a try.