My guess is that Whaat is not seeing any advantage to porting this to SU8.

Thanks for sharing, Eric.

Well, I was fartoo busy to "play" when this came out...
which one is it - "the early bird gets the worm" or "good things come to those who wait"?

So, without further ado... Twilight Render - Easy 10 render setting with HDR Probe Spherical Sky lighting and one IES lamp light.
No post production.
had fun modifying the marble contents.
Download scene, hdr, and IES file to try for yourself and extra marble here.

@morisdov said:

@unknownuser said:

to insert a new position anywhere between two old positions

1. add a new animation position as a new last position
2. open the 'Animation Attributes Map'
3. 'Move Left' the latest last position in between the two old positions

Fantastic! I love that clicking on the little "A" in that dialog animates each and every thing individually.

Wanted to put in a plug for Morisdov's great ruby script "Proper Animation"... maybe some have not tried it.

Testing a concept here... a building that you see sort of 'coming together'.
>>>Download .avi 1.2Mb video (xvid codec)<<< (right-click, save-as in order to open the file on your computer and watch at original resolution.)

Proper Animation plugin for animation of the building parts.
I render the whole sequence using Twilight Render. You can read a step-by-step of the process of how to render a SketchUp animation here.

To see with a slightly higher frame rate, different music, but fixed motion of right skywalk, and color of trees:

Download .avi 1.2Mb video (xvid codec)<<< (right-click, save-as in order to open the file on your computer and watch at original resolution.)

Further testing... just want to re-iterate what a great plugin you have here.

Impressive plugin ThomThom! Wow!
(I obviously need a better displacement map for this tile now.)

@danielito,

I use SketchUp with Proper Animation for animation of the building.
I render the whole sequence in Twilight Render.
It renders a still image in .jpg format (or whichever format I choose) for each frame of the animation.
Then I open the sequence of images in Virtual Dub.
I set up the audio and apply xvid compression, then save from Virtual Dub as .avi. There's only one compression I have found that is better than xvid, but I don't have it installed yet in Virtual Dub, and xvid works great, and very very fast, while maintaining good quality. (your video must be in dimensions multiple of 4 if you wish to use xvid or some other great codecs) So when you render your animation, keep that in mind.

@Morisdov,
If I can be so bold as to have a wish... it would be to add a position anywhere, so if I have 7 positions filled, and want to add something in the beginning, I could add a position 1, and it would move current position 1 to be now 2, 2 to be 3, and so on... this would make editing the animation sequence much easier. It would be nice, along those lines, if you show it to a client and they ask for changes. So now they want something else to happen between position 4 and position 5, you could add a position in between them without replacing position 5 with something different.

Hope this idea is clear. Sorry if it's a bad explanation.

Final proof of concept video (xvid-550kb) - just to let you know I think it's looking good. Thank you, Morisdov for your responsiveness - It's a great animation plugin and we will continue to promote it via Twilight.

Thanks Rich.

One small issue now: Must Stop and Start Observer after any change to positions, or adding a scene. Or I have to save and close the file, and re-open it to see the changes made. It seems like it 'updated' itself better before.

But now the scene transitions appear to be much smoother because it appears to cause the animation to occur for the entire transition time at .3 easing setting (and this is customizable). Thank you!

Why ".3"?

Test animation with easing fix. (DivX-small prelim)

ps - I had renamed the "old" properanimation thinking that renaming it would disable it. it didn't.
removing it completely from the folder worked. thanks.

Test animation before easing support (Full HD DivX 2Mb).

Will test the easing support version now. Thanks so much for your help!

Edit- tested.
1 - WORKS GREAT! Appears that by default the transition fills the entire Scene Transition Time now.
2 - Am I Missing the Easing Parameter choice?

Dear Morisdov,
I have downloaded the latest version of this plugin. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING!!! It's so powerful.

1. It's really great - works great in SU8, and I can animate no problem.
2. I can render the animation using Twilight no problem.
3. I can open the image sequence created in Virtual Dub and save the image sequence as an .avi no problem.

So what's my problem?
The adjusting of the animation transition times.

When I animate an object, and specify 1 second in SketchUp transition time (I always specify zero time for scene delay) it takes 0.5 seconds for the animation of the object, then the remaining .5 seconds is just the object sitting there in place.

Is it impossible to get the animation of the object to take up the entire transition time so that I can render a video where the animation is not taking up only half of each frame, and then just sitting there?

read more explanation only if interested:
If I set the Scene Delay to 2 seconds, Proper Animation animates the motion of the object for 1 second, and then the remaining second the object is sitting there in place.

The default for each transition is "-1.0" There's no info about this in the "How To" pdf tutorial you created - which is very helpful, in every other way! I will presume that "-1.0" value = "use SketchUp Model Info specified Animation Transition Time"

So if I experiment I find that setting transition for each scene to "0.0" makes the image sequences just fly by - with no animation happening, presumably because they have zero time to be animated. Makes sense.

But no matter if I set the transition time in the Proper Animation Transition Time Dialog to "1.0 or 2.0" or "10.0" it appears that the animation always takes place in half the time specified. This results in a "start quick and stop" animation, when I want a smoothly animated sequence... I want the animation to happen during the whole frame.

Basically, only tweaked materials and time of day. I also rounded some edges. Zero post pro.

a new "old school" look, great work, as usual, David!

Oh, Taff, that's just BEAUTIFUL!
Thanks so much for sharing the model, if I get a chance to use/render it, I'll post back.

great project/great images to explain it, Oli!
It's so nice for school these days to have Photo-realistic rendering to help explain an idea, some times I think several projects I had in school would have critted much better if I had renderings like these to explain what I was going for.

anyway - It's great to hear that crits are tough in school... I have been on many critique panels at different schools and these past few years have found they are getting so watered down that you can't even critique a student any more. any comment perceived as negative, and the other students jump all over you, or I had a friend (excellent designer with more than 20yrs experience and many award-winning designs) who was asked not to return because he had 'offended' a student.

I mainly posted to say it's good to hear the crits are tough... trust me (as a once teacher and student with tough crits) - it's a good thing... and today with laser cutters and photo-real renderings at the touch of a button, you really get to concentrate on design.

definitely check out proper animation, I agree with the others, it's as simple as right-click on group, set position one. go to next scene, select group, rotate group, right click group, set position two.
now click scene one and the group will rotate itself in real time with the transition of the scene. simple as pie.

best to work with components, as you set the axis of the component using "set axis" in SketchUp's context menu, and it will rotate about the axis.

Fred, you are deadly in any app. I think.

I don't particularly care for the wall material, I know when you learn more about the materials in Thea, it will be much improved.

is the green-edged glass with a mat. with dispersion?

@gaieus said:

@thomthom said:

@unknownuser said:

HAve you a little animation of what must the glue's pot must do?

A video of the plugin in use? Yes I'll make one once I make v1.1.0.

Here you go sir (especially, with the annotations it is pretty fast so pause it when needed):

OH! Thanks so much Gaius, I was very confused what the point of this plugin was... so now, when I copy lights on the ceiling and they don't cut the opening in the face, the "Superglue" will "fix" it so that they DO cut the opening... BRILLIANT!

Thanks for sharing, ThomThom!

I do not think it looks bad right now...
but you see the dark lines around the edges of your flat color areas? they are making "grooves" that are not really there on the rug, and are what are making it look not real.

I would start by using the "posterize" effect in Photoshop on your original color image... this may help you to get groups of flat colors. Then use the Black and White function in Photoshop Cs3 or later that allows you to color each batch of color and how light or dark you want it to be.

The noise, I would experiment independantly with a noise map and the material template you want to use for the rug... when you think the noise is looking right, then overlay it onto the posterized black and white bump map when you get it looking right independantly of the noise.

hope this makes sense.

I only stumbled upon to your question here, and only responded here because this is the same for any render engine bump map - a "true" bump map (not just converting a color image to a contrasty black and white) makes a big difference to the look of your material.