Hi Everybody, I'm New
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I everybody at SketchUcation,
I have just joined the forum and look forward to valuable communication with other members.
I have been using SketchUp for about a year, but not on a regular basis............so I still have much to learn.Would anybody like to offer some advise with regard to animating in SU? I have found that when shadows is turned on, it takes forever to do any animating in a fairly high frame rate to get a quality output and it is incredibly frustrating to get anything done as my machine needs to think for ages over every mouse click. When I turn shadows off, it's so much quicker. I can understand that when SU has to generate all the shadows, it's going to take some time, but can anything be done to speed up the process and stop crashes? Does it depend on how much RAM you have on your machine to make SU work better and faster?
Any advise is appreciated
Thanks
Michael
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Hi Michael,
It more depends on hardware acceleration by your video card. What card do you have?
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Hi Gaieus,
Thank you for your response.
I have an iMac 2.8GHz with 4 GB of RAM. It's running a ATI RADEON HD 2600 PRO.
I know the latest iMacs have a faster graphics card ( AMD RADEON HD 6970M ) is apparently the one that is used in the latest machines. So the better your graphics card........means SketchUp will run more efficiently? I just assumed it was all about how much RAM the machine has. I also discovered that you can't change the RAM allocation in SU like you can in Photoshop for example!
Since I registered with SketchUcation I am finding out all sorts of interesting info and seeing great work by the members. This is all very good and hopefully I will be able to improve my ability with SU.
Many thanks
Michael -
Well, SU is both CPU and GPU based application when it comes to real time rendering your model during navigation inside. CPU will mainly render geometry while GPU (if it can support it - and your card seems to be fine enough) will render image based textures, shadows and such. So it is kind of split between these hardware parts.
Memory mainly comes into question when you export large images. Generally Macs have been known to be better in this area but lately SU was made large address aware on Windows, too, so on a 64 bit OS this should not be as big of an issue as it used to be - but note that SU is still a 32 bit application and will not use more RAM than 4 Gb (although I am certainly not very good at Macs so someone may still chime in and correct me).
Now as a general advice; keep shadows off while modelling.
Also turn off endpoints, profiles and all sorts of fancy style features.
Do not use those raster image based styles when modelling.
Only texture your model when you are done with building it.Here is a hardware speed test with interesting results:
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=20076 -
Hi Gaieus,
Thanks very much for your advise...much appreciated!
As a relative beginner I'm having a lot of fun with SU. I find it comparatively easy to work with compared to some of the other 3D apps that I have downloaded trial versions to check out. Ultimately my interest is also in rendering & animation so I am looking at all the various plug ins and 3rd party software available to use with SU.
There seems to be a huge variety. It would be great if Su were further developed to be able to do rendering and animation within the program to a high standard.......but then I guess it wouldn't be free!I'm looking forward to posting some of my work at some stage.
Thanks again
Michael
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I'm not sure of what you mean by "animating" in SU as Scenes are the only native way to animate SU objects. There are just a very few plugins that give you animation, SketchyPhysics being the more versatile.
But in my experience, even with a reasonably high end CPU and GPU, I keep lights, shadows, fog and all that other rendering stuff OFF while creating and editing the model. In fact I also keep flipping between Textures on/off most of the time.
Only when I have placed my model in a "finished" state or a "look-see" position do I turn on any other rendering features.
I also do not change viewpoints with the rendering features on.I also use layers extensively, turning on only the layers I need to create or edit. In some complex models I may have only 1 or 2 objects on a layer, and that model may contain over 100 layers. I use "Layer Manager" for quick control of common sets of layers.
As a result I can pan and zoom with relative speed and ease even very large and complex models.
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Hi Joel,
Thanks for your comments and help.
I downloaded a trial version of "SketchyPhysics" , but can't seem to load it into SU on my Mac. I placed it into the plugins folder and re-booted, which is normally all you have to do on a Mac, but it's not functioning as yet, I haven'y been able to find an install procedure for the Mac as yet, not to worry I'll figure it out.
Yes I haven't been very sensible with my use of layers in SU. I have a fairly complex model of a city street that includes cars complete buildings and several trams that I built together with quite a number of 2D people. I have grouped as much of it as I can, but it is still very cumbersome. I should have created at least 10-15 layers, I'm sure that would have made things a little easier. The animation part is to have the trams, cars and people moving all at the same time in a variety of short sequences. I'm keeping the sequences very short with only 2 scenes and about 150 tweens between each of them. I have kept the shadows turned off for the animation and it seemed to work OK provided I kept each little episode very short. I duplicated the file after each little sequence, so that I didn't end up with all the scenes on the one file. Now I'm sure this is not the way to do it.......but I'm afraid my inexperience is showing here. I also noticed that if the shadows are turned off for animation the final output Quicktime movie looks very washed out, but with a few close-ups and editing, it doesn't look too bad for the internet at least, which is the purpose for this animation.
But as mentioned I'm sure there has got to be a better way of doing this. I did have a look at an app called "Sketchers Studio" but can't get it to fire up on my Mac. The manufacturer tells me I need to up-grade my OS to the latest version for the Mac.....but I'm a little hesitant to do that because the last time I did it....the OS upgrade would recognise the drivers for my scanner and printer......oh the joys of computing!!!
Ill see if I can find an install procedure for SketchPhysics for the Mac.
Cheers
Michael
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There is a separately moderated SketchyPhysics forum. The main moderator is SP's creator; Chris Phillips and the usual helpers are very responsive.
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewforum.php?f=61
I have zero MAC experience, so I can't help there.
However, since you are an SU newbie, tackling SP will be a steeper learning curve than it already is.
Now I am not quite clear on what you are trying to do. You say you have 2 scenes with 150 tweens. To me that is 150 scenes, and that is not small. Are you trying to create a separate view per frame of video? If so that is overkill depending on your Quicktime frame-rate but I'm guessing here.
You may want to post a few JPG extracts of your model, or perhaps the model itself, here or at SketchyPhysics and we can better discern how to optimize it.
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