Animation SUalive extension. May you test beta version?

SUalive

Hello,

We are pleased to announce SUalive Free is now cross-platform - Windows or Mac Osx.

Thanks to Helen and Hugh, Vincent ( osx59) and some others for the time. That Osx very first version also owns a debt to John ( driven ) for his welcome and wise advices and the nice way he offers to test SUalive user interface.
I would like to tell you nothing would have been possible without your great help. It's an honour for me to have met such friendly people.
If there is anything I can do for you, it will be a pleasure.

Have a good week-end

jumpjack

I think there is a bug in handling face-me objects, they do strange things my animatioms.

Additionally: could the animation start and stop be "smoothed" by accelerating/decelerating the objects?

jumpjack

Question: can free version also animate camera orientation?

jumpjack

some further notes:

.ydprj files are not automatically associated to anything, so currently I must:

start sketchup
start plugin
specify project path
click "reload model"

A double click on a .ydprj file would be much more comfortable.

There is no memory of "recent files" in the plugin

Dan Rathbun

@jumpjack said:

A double click on a .ydprj file would be much more comfortable.

As far as I know, there is no way to implement a double-click for a specific extension.

The ARGV array is empty after SketchUp loads. If we were running a system Ruby process (inside of one embedded in an application's process,) then all the command line parameters would be stuffed into the ARGV array, and an extension might be able to process the parameters.

Class: ARGF (Ruby 2.0.0)

Class : ARGF - Ruby 2.0.0

(ruby-doc.org)

BUT, ... the SketchUp development team decided NOT to pass SketchUp.exe's startup parameters into it's Ruby sub-process.

There might be a kind of workaround. If a utility program or script could be associated with a double-click on a .ydprj file, and a system environment variable set to hold the path to the .ydprj file, then start SketchUp,... if the extension loads and checks the ENV hash for a value in a "YDPRJ" variable, ... said extension would be able to act upon it.

jumpjack

Maybe Sketchup development team didn't decide it... they just didn't think about it.

jumpjack

Could an option be added to generate a Sketchup Scene per each animation frame created by the plugin?
This would allow us to associate a renderer plugin like "Twilight Render V2" to this plugin, to create rendered animations in "batch mode".

WhyDi

Hello jumpjack2.

…Or maybe it's a matter of clicking save&reload button at the "right" time…
You probably give the “right” answer. In a perfect world SketchUp model is never modified along animation process. This way, no issue! BUT in the real world we need to add any group we missed which should be animated. Here comes save&reload button. The next release – by the end of this month - will see a blinking orange colour so that you never miss that need. Please, also remember SUalive Free aims tiny projects and be aware modifying SketchUp model along animation may break all previous snapshots – only interpolation drawback. They are nothing more than photo that cannot be modified.

…Shouldn't be enough to...?
Once more you’re right! But only from SUalive Free version perspective which is nothing more than a subset of SUalive Full. Light and Full versions are able to deal with multiple SketchUp models inside a single project. Each project can be split in smaller sequence and so forth. All this makes we can’t automate more than what you know.

…I think some tooltips…
You know what? You are right! This month release will additionally see full help from our website. Maybe any tutorial and new video. A bit too early to tell you!
https://sualive.com/en_help.php

…Bug: face-me…
Added on ToDo list but priority is now on publishing help and next release.

…Question: can free version also animate camera orientation?...
You can learn about version related features from our website, versions tab.
https://sualive.com/en_versions.php

…A double click on a .ydprj…
Thanks Dan for your reply. Perfect as always!

… generate a Sketchup Scene per each animation…
Older version had but we got rid of as SketchUp would probably not support dozen or hundreds of scenes. As instance 30fps * 60sec = 1800 scenes. How to deal with 1800 tabs inside SketchUp?

…associate a renderer plugin…
If you want any renderer to work, please ask the extension maker for contacting us. We will be all our best to please you.

By the way I’m hard negotiating frame by frame replay slider available on SUalive Free. I hope my peers are going to agree on next Friday meeting - today is still holiday. Probably not all features available but basically replaying from the window top slider.

Have a good week-end.
WhyDi

jumpjack

@whydi said:

… generate a Sketchup Scene per each animation…
Older version had but we got rid of as SketchUp would probably not support dozen or hundreds of scenes. As instance 30fps * 60sec = 1800 scenes. How to deal with 1800 tabs inside SketchUp?

…associate a renderer plugin…
If you want any renderer to work, please ask the extension maker for contacting us. We will be all our best to please you.

Thanks for your effort.
I had an idea for making SUalive communicating with Twilight render: creating a temporary new scene per each frame, deleted immediately after Twilight plugin has processed it.
But I don't know how two different plugins could work at same time...
Maybe SUalive could save scenes data into an "interchange file", which is then read by Twilight to generate needed scenes one by one?

Anyway here is where you can contact the developers:
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/twilight-render-v2#comment-84241

SUalive

Hello,

SUalive Free 2.40 under review...

see features update on the following thread (replay slider, render)
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=65306&p=631451#p631451

Have a good day
WhyDi