This extension seems to be gone... it was great for analysing steep terrain... ALAS it was great!

If there are any advanced Australian Sketchup users out there who are interested in being their own boss and want to try their hand at teaching Sketchup to beginner and intermediate users send me a private message. Established business teaching students face-to-face and also online courses. Good SEO ranked website, course materials and decent $$$

Okay this is a Layout 2017 bug.

When you export to DWG, if you have an PDF image on any of your drawings sheets, Layout 2017 will crash. I tried to export the file back to Layout 2016 or 2015 but to no avail. You have to remove them from your file and purge the file if you want it to work.

Jaguarrh,

As an alternative to Procad who seem to just provide a basics course, sketchuptraining.com.au do a couple of more advanced courses; one that covers Visualisation/rendering with Sketchup and a course for producing technical drawings with Sketchup and Layout.

The courses focus mostly on architecture and building design but they do cover terrain modelling as well as the use of advanced plugins to extend Sketchup's capabilities.

They seem to specialise only in Sketchup unlike the others you mention and if you look at the gallery on the website or follow the link to the Facebook page, they have some very impressive examples.

It says that courses are held once or twice a year in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

Worth a look...
Grice

Hi Whaat, good to hear from you!

Absolutely there is demand for your plugin; I use it quite a lot. The other flythrough plugins around require you to create spline camera paths and generate multiple tween scenes that force you to save multiple copies of your model... this becomes a major nuisance when there are design changes. And don't get me started about the face-me component artifacts when using SU's base animation exporter...

There are 3 issues with the Smoothstep plugin that are a bit of a problem for me at the moment:

1 - When generating frames, at certain points the time to generate a single frame can suddenly blow out dramatically. I have attached a sample file. If you just generate the animation using the standard settings, at frame 33, you'll notice that SU seems to freeze. When generating this animation in Full HD, that particular frame took my computer 2 hours and 52 mins. It is not obvious what causes this problem but possibly something to do with face-me components coming into view. Happens on both my PC and Mac.

2 - There is a small jump when the SU changes over to the next scene. Very small but still noticeable.

3 - If you exclude some scenes from the animation by unchecking the "include in animation" checkbox, those scenes are excluded but a whole stack of still frames are added to the end of the animation. This just means that you are rendering stuff unnecessarily and you often have to force close SU to stop it which isn't ideal.

I love your work and as I said, I'm willing to donate to see that some of these small bugs are fixed.

Grice

BuddhistTemple-Test.zip

Back in 2011, I reported this bug and Tricia S of the Sketchup Team said it was a high priority bug fix. But even the latest release of Sketchup 2016 still has this random artifacting problem on face me components when generating an animation.

Hard to know what to say really. Some of the inference improvements in SU2016 are great; but this problem with the standard export animation is a real disappointment. Smooth-step plugin - it is alright but has a few bugs - has a tendency to get stuck and take about 30mins generating the odd frame now and then which can seriously blow out rendering times. Do I need to export my model files back to SU7 to when animations were working properly?

I hate to be a whinger, but I and many other Pro license owners have sunk many thousands of dollars into the Google/Trimble coffers.

Can we please just get this problem fixed?!

I take it all back... despite Trimble's plugin warehouse listing this plugin as not compatible with SU2016, I installed it anyway and it is working fine...

Looks like Trimble need to up their game in terms of keeping their customers satisfied. Isn't that what we pay our yearly subscription fees for?

Thanks Duane, yes it is not easy with the currently available plugins. I won the commission to design this building complex based on an earlier similar presentation. There is definitely a market there for a decent yet simple fly-thru plugin.

I know this is an old one but I use this plugin a lot! It is so simple to use and does not have the face me component artifacting issue that occurs with the standard Google/Trimble animation export. I flagged this many years ago if you track back through this post, but Trimble are obviously not interested in fixing it. As Duanekemp mentioned, there are so few simple but decent walkthrough plugins available and I am worried that one day this one will stop being compatible with a new version of SU.

I don't know if Dale (Whaat) is still around but one thing I noticed and would love to have fixed is the little jump you get when transitioning from one view to the next. You can see it my video here: https://youtu.be/RyRShpSTtLg

Also while generating images, it tends to put a stack of still frames on the end of the animation. I'm no coder but these items seem fairly minor and surely not too hard to fix.

I'd go so far as to say that I would be prepared to pay [highlight=#ff0000:crn1w7rw]money[/highlight:crn1w7rw] (and I am sure others would too) to have some of these minor things fixed.

Dale, if you are out there, we'd love to hear from you!

A bit peeved when I looked at the long list of incompatible plugins that no longer work for SU2016. This is a request to TIG to update this fantastic plugin which I use probably on every project. Please update it for SU2016.... PLEASE!

Wow, I only just saw a video of this. I have been looking for something like this since I started my business. I have been modelling all my projects with a combination of 1001Bit tools and a handful of other scripts that don't quite gel.

And I am in Australia too so I can see recognisable product manufacturers and suppliers!

But here's the catch though: No Mac version

Aadbuild - I put it to you that there is a market for a mac version. Happy to put my hand up for testing.

I'll weigh into this discussion.

I recently bought a Macbook Pro with an Intel HD 4000 GPU to complement my existing one which has a higher spec option ATI Radeon HD 6750M GPU. They are exactly the same computer (identical CPU and RAM) except for the graphics cards.

Tried them out using a fairly intensive sketchup model (approx 30Mb) and could not tell them apart. Open GL, maximum texture size and hardware acceleration all turned on. Rotating the view was fine, maybe generating the shadows was a fraction slower on the HD 4000 computer.

While it could be a different story in a Windows system, for Sketchup running on a Mac the Intel HD 4000 GPU is fine.

I have been using this plugin for a while but have been running into a few problems, particularly on my PC (Mac to lesser extent). When generating frames, sometimes the frame generation can hang for a considerable amount of time. Standard frames will take a minute or two and then there will be a rogue frame that takes 20mins! Sometimes even as much as an hour! This ain't good. Seems to happen more at HD resolutions. It makes video generating times completely unpredictable.

Some sort of feature to universally number frames so that the animation can be stopped/started or "farmed" to other computers without messing up the frame sequence would also be fantastic.

I know this plugin was written a while ago but I am just hoping Whaat that you will relook at it again because it is a very useful script for my line of work...

Thank you Tomdubbs. I only just came back to this post and saw your solution. Excellent! Just trying it out now...

Whaat, many many thanks for this and the person who replied to my post solving my little artifact problem that the programmers appeared not to be interested in fixing. Great script!

Hi Tricia,

Thank you for the update. It is an odd problem and I hope that the team can sort it out soon.

Kind regards

Grice

Tricia,

I realise this was reported a while ago but is there any patch or update in the wings to fix this problem? I can't really offer animated walk-throughs to my clients when this problem is still occurring.

Regards

Grice

I'd even label this a bug...

This issue had been kicking around since the SU7 days some 3 years ago. Image texture size is downscaled to 1024x1024, and it can be increased to 2048x2048 by checking an OpenGL checkbox. That is fine for screen display, but when you export your 2D image, the texture rendering size goes back to 1024x1024. Exported images are used for printing and this limitation makes for blurry pixellated results. If you can do it with screen display, why not with output images?

Cutting up image maps into 1024x1024 chunks is not really a satifactory work around.

So how about it Google?

Grice

Fantastic! I'm not going crazy...

Thank you for following this up Gaieus

Grice