@tallbridgeguy said:

I while back I made a video tut on keyframe with kerkythea. Maybe it helps?

Thats a nice video TBG, I'm gonna refer to it in future.

@thomthom said:

The thread seem to be warming up, maybe it's best to leave it in place then, eh?

Yeah lets give it a go as is

@iichiversii said:

I had the same proplem using shaderlight, to get it working correctly after you create tweets, set animation settings trasition to on, and deley to 1, also set render to 1 frame per sec, it worked for me, yeah my rig is only for my characters, but iv rigged tanks, cars with rigs also using the same method, if you like i could render your animation in shaderlight, for you, just send me a link to your skp file, if you like

SKP file isn't ready for rendering at the moment but how much rendering power do you have at your disposal? My dual core laptop is struggling and it would be handy to have someone with a grunty machine that I could send pre-set skp files to who could then render them overnight.....negotiate payment of course

The trailer looks cool - looking forward to seeing it.

When you rig up a character on another layer, as shown, is that so you have easy to grab rotation points with the axis in the right place?

I assume that kind of rigging is character specific - in my machinery animations I have metal pins in all the drawings that all the machinery rotates around.

I just did a test run on a project with keyframe and rendered with twilight - I left it overnight but it didn't capture animation and I can't figure out why - will talk to the folks over at the twilight forum.

Awesome! Feedback - I love it, thanks folks.
Thomthom - I would be keen to move the topic to the sketchup section, I think animation is an important thing for a 3D modelling program to do - sketchup does all most all other 3D modelling/CAD processes and worthwhile animation would be another benefit on the long list that sketchup has. I have personally found 3D animation to be staggeringly powerful in 'selling' a project to someone. They say a picture is worth a thousand words - in that case a good animation must be worth about a billion words.
Tallbridgeguy - Those are nice animations and convey your clever methodology for executing the process - without animation that would be hard to do. My previous animations with proper animation have been similar but more complicated. I think proper animation is neat, and I truly praise Morisdov for his work there, but not its not the commercial level tool I need for lengthy and complex animations. In terms of instability, proper animation takes some real patience to get used to, with more polishing and usability I would pay well for proper animation....but not in its present state.

My proper animation workflow was similar to yours except I used fraps and just screen recorded the animation - fraps gets it in hi-res so saved me a lot of post production time. I would recommend this workflow for simple animations. On my last project with proper animation I created five SU files of the model whose animations linked together. After screen recording with fraps I stitched the five .avi files together in Windows Movie Maker.
iichiversii - That is a clever animation. I have now purchased keyframe animation and will soon give feedback on my experiences with it. Could you describe your workflow to get the animation to that level?
In case the link isn't working for anyone, iichiversii is referring to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP1ILu_IWII&feature=youtu.be
**Wyatt -**Thanks for the input - I have done a bit of work with Sketchy Physics and it is some darn cool software. I saw this animation done with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY5iP0BzNew
I think that animation is really cool. However, for the work I am doing sketchy physics was (as you say) very cumbersome to set up (think saws, logs, chains etc resulting in dozens of SP hinges and other paraphernalia) and often the physical motion I was trying to simulate ultimately didn't work or required so many joints, hinges and boosters to work that my computer simply freaked out when I tried to run the animation....its cool but it won't work in this instance.

I had a go with SU Animate a long time ago and I didn't get very far - would you recommend it for the kind of object animation I am describing?
Baz - Thats a nice animation. Here we're talking about object animation so groups and components are moving around in the animation.
iichiversii - I checked out your blog: http://dawnofheroes.blogspot.com/
The game project sounds cool - can you share much else with us about it?
You must have learned to avoid some serious pitfalls in SU based animation(of which there are many) having played with SU and object animation for that long - what else can you share with us?

Thanks for the feedback everyone - keep it coming.

I am looking to get permission to share the complex (five SU files) animation, that I did with proper animation, on the web - if possible I will share it here.

Looking forward to hearing more

Ash

You generally have some experience with....well.....most things sketchup - got any recommendations Gai?

Did I post this in the wrong place or something?

Or should I just change the subject to "FREE BEER" to try and get some more attention.....

Sorry,

Two questions:

1. What are people's experiences with keyframe animation for machinery-type animations in SU?

2. What other workflows do people have (including exporting to another file format and animating with 3rd party software) that are an effective way to do a complex animation from SU file?

I've done some pretty major animations using proper animation in SU - we're talking a week+ of work.

These have required me to do post production editing due to the difficulties in getting timing (and other things) right with proper animation.

In some instances I have used flash and transitioned the final animation video to a 2D format and shown certain processes that way so that I could get timing down to the nth degree.

Unfortunately, a lot of this kind of work is under intellectual property agreements so I can't share it here....
But the animations are of a length and complexity that I haven't seen proper animation used for in any other places on the web.

However, as I said before - proper animation is just not cutting it and I'm convinced someone out there has found a slicker workflow to get this sort of thing done more efficiently.

What are people's experiences with keyframe animation?

Ash

I have completed several projects with proper animation, and it is good - it does everything that it ought to.

But I am wanting to hear people's thoughts about other ways to animated with SU as I can't get the accuracy (timing etc) I want with proper animation.

I don't know much about keyframe animation and I have heard that simlab has a good third party animation extension - what are people's thoughts/recommendations?

Are there other good options that I haven't mentioned?

Are there 3rd party packages that SU can export to that I would be better to use for up coming industrial machinery animations?

Thanks in advance

Ash

Yeah relocating the components axis generally works for me, just make sure you get the red green and blue axis pointing in the right direction. If it acts weird then you have the wrong colour axis pointing the wrong way.

Ash

Thanks Gai,

Its all making sense now - seems like a funny way for SU to behave though, I'm sure there is a good reason of some kind

Ash

Well, in case anyone ever reads this again and needs a solution, my suggestion would be to:
1)Import your texture
2)Open the materials dialog (paintbucket)
3)Select "In Model" from the drop-down arrow in the materials dialog
4)Select the texture you just imported
5)Select the "Edit" tab
6)Click the "chain" image to lock aspect ratio
7)Adjust the width units until you have the texture to the size you need (use tape measure to check)
8)Under "In Model" right click the texture you just adjusted and select "Save As"
9)Save it as a .skm file in your 'materials' folder (C>Program Files>Google>Google Sketchup 8>Materials
10)Open a new sketchup session
11)Open materials browser (paintbucket) and select materials
12)Select the material you just saved
13)Apply it to whatever geometry you need
14)Save the file and the material should remain the correct dimensions regardless of how a user opens the file.

Message me if you need help with this - I found SU kinda unintuitive in this area (probably because its not designed with this sort of thing in mind)

Thanks for the help TIG

@tig said:

Another work around would be to use 'make_unique' on the already mapped material, and then using that new version of the material from the Browser that will keep that sizing 'frozen' - although remember that if the face you sampled for the 'make_unique' version were smaller than the original pattern's repeat the texture would be 'cropped' in the new version...

My materials are 'tiled' so that they repeat. If I use "make unique" it seems to mess up the tiling irrespective of whether the face I'm making it unique on is actually bigger than the texture or not...

@tig said:

However, using the original un-mapped material picked directly from the Browser, on a third face it will still use the original texture sizing and look different. This is irrespective of if it's within the original SKP or if it were in a SKP imported into a second SKP etc.

The textures don't seem to have a default size - if I import a texture into a sketchup file, and then select it in the "In Model" section of the materials browser and then paint it on to a clean face it defaults to a certain size.

Then if I open a new sketchup session and follow the exact same steps the default size of the texture is different.

I'm going nuts or is something seriously amiss here?

Wow,

Thanks very much TIG - as usual your advice is pure gold.

The best idea I can come up with to re-size a jpg image texture accurately is to import it into sketchup, measure how far it is (expressed as a percentage of overall size) from the desired dimensions and then open it in GIMP or photoshop and scale it by the previously measured percentage.

I think this is very important to know about texture sizing and bet it has tripped up many people in the past.

Ash

Excuse my ignorance, there were already some useful posts on this topic.

Basically, it seems, sketchup interprets a texture (brought in through File>Import>) differently to the way it interprets a material (.skm file or a texture that ends up in the materials dialog). This results in textures that were the right proportion changing size when they are dealt with through the materials dialog.

The best solution appears to be saving your textures as materials (.skm) through the materials dialog.

Hopefully this will help someone else with the same issues.

Also see here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=38043&p=336291&hilit=material+files#p336291

It appears to have something to do with the way SU interprets Materials as opposed to textures because when I change the file to a .skm it imports at crazy proportions as well

Hi all, I wondered if anyone else has encountered this issue before:

I'm opening brick textures in sketchup so that they can be painted onto existing sketchup models. The bricks have very specific sizes and detail so they can't be standard .skm material files. Thus they have to come from an existing .skp (that I have created earlier).

So I open a .skp file that shows the brick texture at the correct size. I click it with the eyedropper and paint it to another face.....the texture size remains the same and all is well.

However, if I open the materials dialogue box and select "In Model" and find the texture within the dialogue box, select it and paint it to an existing face, it displays larger than it should....

I can't understand what is causing this to happen and am wondering if anyone can shed some light.

Thanks in advance

Ash

Quick comment: I've had a similar problem that I couldn't reproduce on other machines - turned out that my graphics card was packing a sad. Something us simple as updating your drivers might help