Rotate animation of an object

[Mukkinn]

Hi everybody !

Ok, theres my problem.
I'm a big newbie in Sketchup and i'm french, so it's a little difficult for me to explain my problem without being too much vague, hope that's not goin' to bother you.

I need to make an animation of an object in Sketchup.
The animation is really simple, I just want a rotating sphere (like a planet) on a fixed point.

I tried every tutorials and plugins I found on the net, but nothing works. Apparently the main problem in this kind of animation is the position of the camera, everytime I try to rotate the camera around my sphere, the result is not accurate at all, i really need to "lock" the camera on orbit around the object to give the illusion of rotation.

How can I do that ? It's driving me crazy since 2 days now.
I think I approached something similar at what i want with SU ANIMATED, but the plugin is very instable and crash everytime i want to create a big enough circular path around my object, also I really don't undersand how to "lock" my camera on this path.

Somebody can explain to me the best solution at this problem ?

Thank you very much !

[Dave R]

You can do this natively in SketchUp in a couple of ways. You could set up camera positions as scenes around the globe and animate between them or you could make multiple copies of the globe component with each one rotated slightly. Then you put each copy of the globe on a different layer and switch between visible layers for different scenes. I'll find some examples and post them.

[cotty]

Like this ?

[Dave R]

Ok, here's the examples I was thinking of.

This was done by setting up the camera in positions around the ball. Click here to see the animation.

I animated the doors on the cabinet by making a radial array with the Rotate tool. (hit Ctrl to invoke the copy function of the Rotate tool, rotate by the desired number of degrees, hit Enter followed by *n where n is the number of copies you want to create. See more about that by clicking on the image.

I did the same for the hook spinning spinning around the bobbin in this animation of a sewing machine making a lock stitch.

[pilou]

have you try Mover ?

And the French Forum