Hi Joel,

Thanks for your comments and help.

I downloaded a trial version of "SketchyPhysics" , but can't seem to load it into SU on my Mac. I placed it into the plugins folder and re-booted, which is normally all you have to do on a Mac, but it's not functioning as yet, I haven'y been able to find an install procedure for the Mac as yet, not to worry I'll figure it out.

Yes I haven't been very sensible with my use of layers in SU. I have a fairly complex model of a city street that includes cars complete buildings and several trams that I built together with quite a number of 2D people. I have grouped as much of it as I can, but it is still very cumbersome. I should have created at least 10-15 layers, I'm sure that would have made things a little easier. The animation part is to have the trams, cars and people moving all at the same time in a variety of short sequences. I'm keeping the sequences very short with only 2 scenes and about 150 tweens between each of them. I have kept the shadows turned off for the animation and it seemed to work OK provided I kept each little episode very short. I duplicated the file after each little sequence, so that I didn't end up with all the scenes on the one file. Now I'm sure this is not the way to do it.......but I'm afraid my inexperience is showing here. I also noticed that if the shadows are turned off for animation the final output Quicktime movie looks very washed out, but with a few close-ups and editing, it doesn't look too bad for the internet at least, which is the purpose for this animation.

But as mentioned I'm sure there has got to be a better way of doing this. I did have a look at an app called "Sketchers Studio" but can't get it to fire up on my Mac. The manufacturer tells me I need to up-grade my OS to the latest version for the Mac.....but I'm a little hesitant to do that because the last time I did it....the OS upgrade would recognise the drivers for my scanner and printer......oh the joys of computing!!!

Ill see if I can find an install procedure for SketchPhysics for the Mac.

Cheers

Michael

Hi Gaieus,

Thanks very much for your advise...much appreciated!

As a relative beginner I'm having a lot of fun with SU. I find it comparatively easy to work with compared to some of the other 3D apps that I have downloaded trial versions to check out. Ultimately my interest is also in rendering & animation so I am looking at all the various plug ins and 3rd party software available to use with SU.
There seems to be a huge variety. It would be great if Su were further developed to be able to do rendering and animation within the program to a high standard.......but then I guess it wouldn't be free!

I'm looking forward to posting some of my work at some stage.

Thanks again

Michael

Hi Gaieus,

Thank you for your response.

I have an iMac 2.8GHz with 4 GB of RAM. It's running a ATI RADEON HD 2600 PRO.

I know the latest iMacs have a faster graphics card ( AMD RADEON HD 6970M ) is apparently the one that is used in the latest machines. So the better your graphics card........means SketchUp will run more efficiently? I just assumed it was all about how much RAM the machine has. I also discovered that you can't change the RAM allocation in SU like you can in Photoshop for example!

Since I registered with SketchUcation I am finding out all sorts of interesting info and seeing great work by the members. This is all very good and hopefully I will be able to improve my ability with SU.

Many thanks
Michael

I everybody at SketchUcation,

I have just joined the forum and look forward to valuable communication with other members.
I have been using SketchUp for about a year, but not on a regular basis............so I still have much to learn.

Would anybody like to offer some advise with regard to animating in SU? I have found that when shadows is turned on, it takes forever to do any animating in a fairly high frame rate to get a quality output and it is incredibly frustrating to get anything done as my machine needs to think for ages over every mouse click. When I turn shadows off, it's so much quicker. I can understand that when SU has to generate all the shadows, it's going to take some time, but can anything be done to speed up the process and stop crashes? Does it depend on how much RAM you have on your machine to make SU work better and faster?

Any advise is appreciated

Thanks

Michael