[Plugin] Animator - v4.5a - 22 Jul 25

HuiJax

Hey Fredo,

thx for the Answer. I would like to make Animation like in this Video...

Short Summary. He Move each object step by step and capture this movement of the Enscape "Frame Buffer" on a Second Screen. In Adobe Premiere he cut it together and it looks smooth.

I want to the same with the support of Animator. When i play the Animation it goes to fast an the live Render have a bad quality. So i must rest for a second and then move on with the next frame. Like this i can manage the movement of different object simultaneously and coordinate it much better the manuell with hand... i hope i could explain this a bit better and sorry for the bad english...

best regards

fredo6

@huijax said:

Hey Fredo,

thx for the Answer. I would like to make Animation like in this Video...

Short Summary. He Move each object step by step and capture this movement of the Enscape "Frame Buffer" on a Second Screen. In Adobe Premiere he cut it together and it looks smooth.

I want to the same with the support of Animator. When i play the Animation it goes to fast an the live Render have a bad quality. So i must rest for a second and then move on with the next frame. Like this i can manage the movement of different object simultaneously and coordinate it much better the manuell with hand... i hope i could explain this a bit better and sorry for the bad english...

best regards

You can indeed construct this kind of animation with Animator, as it implies just moving objects.

However, Enscape is not supported by Animator. So, you would have to render it with another rendering software.

Otherwise, the method described in the video is quite astute and you can mimic it.

HuiJax

Again, thank you very much for your Answer! Iam a big Fan of your Work an love to use your PlugIn´s!

So the concept of the Animation is clear. I made an animation with Animator. A simple movement of an Object. In the next Step i skip Frame by Frame the Animation and record the live renderig with Enscape and put them together in Premiere. So my question is (and sry for the big explanation) is there an shortkey to skip frame by frame in the Timeline (in Premiere it is a arrow key). If not, it would be Great if there coulde be one in the future Version...

Thank you for your Time and your patience!

lrainero

Hey Fredo,

Thank you very much because Animator is helping me a lot in my work.
I have a problem and I don't know if you could help me.
I use Sketchup 20 and V-Ray 4.20.01
When generating mp4 video the process stops without doing anything. Sometimes it stops at frame 10 and sometimes at 30 ... and I can't render the video.
My animation has a duration of 145 seconds and approximately 3,400 frames, with an estimated time of 50 hours. My PC has 16Gb of Ram, a Ryzen 2700x processor and my graphics card is an Nvidia gtx 6Gb.

I don't know if you can help me, but thank you very much anyway.

P.D: Sorry for the text if it is not well understood because I do not speak English and I am using a translator.

fredo6

@lrainero said:

When generating mp4 video the process stops without doing anything. Sometimes it stops at frame 10 and sometimes at 30 ... and I can't render the video.
My animation has a duration of 145 seconds and approximately 3,400 frames, with an estimated time of 50 hours.

I think you push Animator quite far. If I understand, each frame would take over 50 seconds to render. Maybe you can try to simplify to have a faster unitary render.

With VRay 4.2, there is a problem of stability with the API and I would not recommend to engage in such long process.

I am currently investigating VRay 5, which has a cleaner API and may be more reliable.

Fredo

Danial Ismail

Thank you for your videos and extension, I have a problem for exporting the animation as a video(all format options have the same problem). I use a Mac and have already installed LibFredo6, Animator and FFMPEG. When exporting the animation as video, i have chosen MP4 but it only renders as PNG images and there is no play button under the MP4 format button in the menu. How can i solve this? Thank you in advance!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MIblLevGT2WRjx_8OP5P_DcvnX0KoaEp/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16NjrfxCdQEBOCHxPPhIG6a_Y2uOw3zIu/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cSjdBnmuVJn_dKd3VIPnd8jge4NFki12/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yu5zEQh5hdVrnyleU0OseUhbxYfyUnKL/view?usp=sharing

fredo6

@danial ismail said:

When exporting the animation as video, i have chosen MP4 but it only renders as PNG images and there is no play button under the MP4 format button in the menu.

Could you open the Ruby Console before launching the video generation.

At the end of the process, you should see something like

Command FFmpeg for mp4 = "C:/Google Drive/Ruby/Ruby/AA_SCRIPT_20/ffmpeg.exe" -framerate 25 -i "Image%02d.png" -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -q:v 1 -vf scale=2*trunc(iw/2*3):-2 "Film 1.mp4" 2> FFmpeg_log_mp4.txt ===> Status FFmpeg for mp4 = true

Can you tell me what you see.

Also, could you type (copy paste and return) the following command in the ruby console

[Sketchup.active_model.active_view.vpwidth, Sketchup.active_model.active_view.vpheight]

It should return the viewport dimensions.

Many thanks

Fredo

Danial Ismail

@fredo6 said:

@danial ismail said:

When exporting the animation as video, i have chosen MP4 but it only renders as PNG images and there is no play button under the MP4 format button in the menu.

Could you open the Ruby Console before launching the video generation.

At the end of the process, you should see something like

Command FFmpeg for mp4 = "C:/Google Drive/Ruby/Ruby/AA_SCRIPT_20/ffmpeg.exe" -framerate 25 -i "Image%02d.png" -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -q:v 1 -vf scale=2*trunc(iw/2*3):-2 "Film 1.mp4" 2> FFmpeg_log_mp4.txt ===> Status FFmpeg for mp4 = true

Can you tell me what you see.

Also, could you type (copy paste and return) the following command in the ruby console

[Sketchup.active_model.active_view.vpwidth, Sketchup.active_model.active_view.vpheight]

It should return the viewport dimensions.

Many thanks

Fredo

Hi Fredo,

I changed the video output dimensions and it solved the problem! Thanks you for your kind attention to reply my question and trying to help. Keep being awesome.

Best

Danial

fredo6

@danial ismail said:

I changed the video output dimensions and it solved the problem!

Definitely, one of the problem is the generation of the video when one or both dimensions of the viewport are odd in pixels. FFmpeg, which stitches the images, requires they are even. I introduced some hack to work around the problem, but apparently this sometimes fails.

lrainero

@fredo6 said:

@lrainero said:

When generating mp4 video the process stops without doing anything. Sometimes it stops at frame 10 and sometimes at 30 ... and I can't render the video.
My animation has a duration of 145 seconds and approximately 3,400 frames, with an estimated time of 50 hours.

I think you push Animator quite far. If I understand, each frame would take over 50 seconds to render. Maybe you can try to simplify to have a faster unitary render.

With VRay 4.2, there is a problem of stability with the API and I would not recommend to engage in such long process.

I am currently investigating VRay 5, which has a cleaner API and may be more reliable.

Fredo

Thank you very much for your answer.

I'm going to try to divide the animation into shorter parts and then put them together with some editing program.
I hope that with vray 5 you can achieve better results in this case, even so I am very happy and grateful with your plugin.

Thank you very much for everything Fredo!

fredo6

New Release: Animator - v2.9a - 19 Nov 20

Requirement: LibFredo6 v11.3

Major release

Support of VRay 5
Bug fixing
Extension of validity

See plugin home page of Animator for Download of RBZ from the PluginStore.

See Main Post of the Animator thread for more information.

mitch7780

Hi Fredo6,

I generated two animations this week, after the update to v2.9a, and they both came out perfectly.
However when I send them Via WeTransfer, DropBox etc for others to view they are experiencing errors or corrupted files and the videos become unwatchable. The videos are still absolutely fine on my machines though.

This has only happened since the update, is there anything else I need to do to correct this? Do you know why this could be happening?

Thank you.

fredo6

@mitch7780,

Strange. Last update did not touch the video part.

Did you generate with NO rendering or with a rendering software?

What is the format of the video?

mitch7780

Just a standard video, no Vray etc.
File formats in .mov & mp4

Thanks

fredo6

@mitch7780 said:

Just a standard video, no Vray etc.
File formats in .mov & mp4

Thanks

What happens if you download your video posted on DropBox onto your own computer. Would they be corrupted too?

mitch7780

I just tried transferring the file, via DropBox, from my PC to my Imac and it downloaded and played fine.
I'm not too sure what's happening when I send the file over to a client. I've been using WeTransfer previously for other animations and it's been no problem.

Your extension is absolutely fantastic by the way, please don't think that this issue has any effect on how I continue to use Animator. It's probably just one of those things but I had to bring it to your attention just in case you had a solution.

One thing I would like to ask is about the sizing or dimension of the viewport before I start processing, is there a rule of thumb for optimal size, i.e 1920 or 1200 etc...

Thanks again.