Quick word of warning.

If you decide that LumenRT isn't for you, don't do what I did and try and uninstall it using the Windows Control Panel. It completely screwed half of the programme drivers on my PC and despite reverting to a previous restore point I've now got to reinstall half the programmes on my computer.

@chris fullmer said:

How does VUE set up its animations? With "keyframes" between camera locations, and then you apply a linear or bezeir transition? I do not know if you will be able to accurately recreate the camera path that SketchUp uses. But you could export the camera location at each frame, effectively makeing each frame a key frame with a linear transition betwen them.

The ruby API allows you to get the camera object for each frame of its animation. So I would guess that the best way to do what you're looking for is to have the user input the desired frame rate inside of SU, then export the camera location per frame to VUE and have VUE then set up the camera path frame by frame.

Chris

Thanks Chris. You confirmed what I thought. In Vue, you can create linear or curved animation paths. It appears that Sketchup uses some sort of arc-like movement when the camera is rotated around the scene. I like your idea of capturing intermediate key frames - I'll give this a try.

Thanks for all the help. I found the problem. Apparently if you add some geometry to the scene using ruby and then try to export a mesh of non-component geometry, the normals become unsmoothed. An odd quirk.

An olde typo - use 1 for the second test...

That's too bad. Thanks for the repsonse.

TT to the rescue again. Many thanks. I tried it the first way as well but found the send_action call didn't work either. Your second method works like a champ. You're a star.

@thomthom said:

what flags did you use when you obtained the PolygonMesh?

Face.mesh
http://code.google.com/intl/nb/apis/sketchup/docs/ourdoc/face.html#mesh

@unknownuser said:

Add these numbers together to combine flags. A value of 5 will include all flags, for example.

This is wrong. 7 is the value if you want to include them all. It's a bitwise combination of the optional values.

Thanks for that. Indeed, I was using 5 instread of 7 as the mesh flag.

Thanks again