Trying to do a simple trial animation just to make a box rotate. Am using the time slider rather than a tour. Obviously doing something wrong because it "swings" around an origin that is a long way from the model rather than rotating on its axis. I read the bit above about creating it at the origin, not moving the axes, but it still does not seem to help. I am wondering if it could be to do with georeferencing. Here is what I have done, along with numerous other things: Started Sketchup Drew a box centred on the origin Displayed the model in GE. It appeared somewhere over Sydney, floating about 50m above the ground. Saved the model to KMZ Opened it with Winzip and extracted the KML Duplicated the model placemark 3 times Added the timespan and heading fields to each one Copied the KML back into the KMZ Deleted the old model from temporary places and opened the new one. Clicked the time slider to start. The model rotates around a point that is about 300m from the centre of the box. I have attached the KMZ. The next issue once I get that working is how to do the animation with an existing model, where the origin obviously is not at the midpoint of the object that needs to be animated. If one selects the whole model and moves it so that is centred on the origin then the model will no longer be correctly located in GE. So presumably I copy each piece and paste it into a new model centred on the origin...? KMZ containing the timespan and heading changes

These are fantastic and very realistic. I must try a spherical render like this somewhen.

Neither can I. It says (according to the Free Text Translator Info: For reasons sever suvn.net owner of the domain are maintained because of the overload problem should be temporary suvn.net vegetarian sever a new temporary domain .. Members still visit and is working with the link above ... I wish you happy in suvn.net But the link above won´t work. Too bad.

Interesting place. One always wonders how these "sacred areas" have been inherited through ages and cultures. @aerilius said: ...At least I would like better camera control (sometimes the camera fails to show placemarks with a flat angle to the ground) Yes, always be careful not to shoot a very close angle to the ground in SU because that can drive GE nuts. Best is to set the cameras in GE.

Tricky

@Panga: I used VirtualBox 3.0.10 on linux. I found the solution on wikipedia: VirtualBox does support OpenGL (only 32-bit windows XP and Vista, linux, solaris) after having installed the "Guest Additions" (see manual, it's like a setup cd that you put in the virtual operating system) @juan974: I have not yet thought about it... Interesting . The XP on the Virtual Machine cannot be completely compared to a normal XP on a real computer, VirtualBox does not support all techniques that Sketchup can use, like hardware acceleration. Also I used a very stripped down Windows XP which can of course not use the full ram (in my case I allowed it only to use 192MB) because otherwise the host operating system cannot work. The minimal XP install cd can be created with nLite. Luckily SU7.1 works now also in Wine on linux without problems, so I only need VirtualBox for placing models in Google Earth. The above test made me wonder why SU runs faster in a virtual machine than in wine...

Would be cool but it's hell distorted as well, isn't it? (I'll move the topic to the bug reports - leaving a "fascinating" shadow topic here - if you don't mind )

I found a better way for screen catching. Here some more better animations (all in real-time). [image: dwie_animation.gif] [image: NFni_animation2.gif]

Excellent, thanks for the info!

Good idea, thanks Aerilius for sharing MALAISE

Holy cr@p, that's some work! Congrats!

Hm... That may happen. I only have one model like that but I haven't used that link so far since the rejection was correct and I hadn't even uploaded that model for inclusion but as a test (as I also mentioned in the description field).

@tom2 said: Many thanks to Gaieus who helped me solving the display bug! Glad it got solved at all. In fact, I didn't really solved anything - just exported the model and it worked for me. It's a fine model however, congrats.

I posted some final renders in the gallery. In October, I have also rendered some thousand images, but I'm afraid I will not have enough time to finish the animation in the last days of vacations.

I uninstalled GE and cleaned all remains of it. Then I reinstalled the same version (4.3): the problem was not solved. Now I installed GE 5 and the left side of the model is only a little floating (it was really bad before, four times as much). So I will tweak the terrain and accept it. Thanks very much!

While I see what you are after, Tom, Shift is currently used to lock the circle tool on a specific plane. Since it's a general mod. key in SU for all other tools where it can be applied, I doubt that Shift specifically should be used for this. Maybe another key?

great tutorial, thankyou!

BTW, you can hold down shift while using smoove to solve your first problem. it will move (smoove) in the direction of normals.