So I bought Poser. Found it on a sale for $80 (usually $200). Sale link here:

Poser Pro: 3D Art + Animation Software for Windows & Mac | Neowin

Bring your creative vision to life! Poser Pro will help you easily design your own morphs & more

Neowin (deals.neowin.net)

Installed Poser, and spent the morning exploring. Wow, Poser is WAY better for animating 3D characters than anything I've been doing previously. I'm abandoning all earlier techniques to focus on Poser, and wish I'd done this a couple of years ago. Dang, I wasted a lot of time on tools I should have just ignored.

Here's an introduction to animating in Poser:

I've been exploring human animation in Cheetah, a Mac only 3D app.

Cheetah3D User Forum

Cheetah3D User Forum

Cheetah3D User Forum (www.cheetah3d.com)

Poser is a more serious effort focused entirely on human animation, Windows and Mac, $150-$200 from https://www.renderosity.com/

I've been making my way through Poser tutorials, looks pretty promising.

The animation tutorial in the above series is found here:

Hey Dave, congrats, I see you are making steady progress towards your goal.

Honestly, I'm guessing animating people in SketchUp will always be pretty limited, but it's interesting to see how far you can take it. And, I get the appeal of staying within one software, because moving characters from one environment to another is typically a pain in the butt.

Should you wish to expand your focus at some point I'd be happy to discuss Hitfilm (free) and CrazyTalk (cheap), both of which are available for Windows and Mac. But I'll hold off for now so as to not further interrupt your current project.

Keep it coming, watching with interest here.

@faust07 - thanks a bunch for the tip on pivot points and transparent styles. I haven't been able to get one of the artist's characters in to Mixamo yet, but I can now repose them, which is big leap from where I was before your tip.

The process looks like it's going to work in Mixamo, but then at the very end of process the character vanishes. Will research further.

Hang in there Dave, I'm sure you'll build upon what you've started. Look forward to learning from what you accomplish. Thanks for starting this thread. After a slow start I'm starting to get in to it.

On my end, I just successfully imported a SketchUp model in to Cheetah3d. And I see that character animation is definitely doable in Cheetah. So for now at least, it looks like SketchUp models and animated characters can be combined within Cheetah3D. This is better than using Hitfilm, as with Hitfilm while I could import animated characters, I couldn't really animate them from scratch.

I have a long way to go yet before I'll really know what I'm doing, but Cheetah3D does look a lot easier than Blender, so I'm happy about that.

Cheetah3D is Mac only, but I'm sure there must be Windows equivalents.

@faust07 - thanks for the tip, I'll investigate. As you can see, I'm pretty novice at SketchUp.

You write, "To let animated characters from other programs act in SketchUp, I consider the current state of the SketchUp functions to be impossible."

It is possible to get complex animated characters in to SketchUp scenes, as demonstrated in my hippy man jogging video (link above). The SketchUp scene and animated character can be brought together in a video editor which can import 3D models, like Hitfilm for example.

That said, Dave is hoping this thread will reveal ways to animate characters WITHIN SketchUp, a more challenging agenda.

So I really wanted to try Cascadeur, but it's Windows only for now. I looked in to installing Windows on my Mac, but just don't have the stomach for all the bother at the moment.

This reminded me of a Mac 3D app that I hadn't looked at in a couple of years.

Cheetah3D - 3D Software for Mac

Cheetah3D is a versatile and easy to learn 3D software for Mac. Create animations or 3D models for games, virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D printing.

(www.cheetah3d.com)

It's $100 to purchase, and has a free unlimited time trial that offers all features except saving projects.

Here are some YouTube tutorials which discuss animation in this software.

It will export in DAE, FBX and some other formats. So you should be able to pose a character in Cheetah and bring it in to SketchUp. To add an animated character to a SketchUp scene I guess you'd have to use the video editor method.

So if you wanted to create your own character animations, and not have to rely on Mixamo stock animations, and are on a Mac, Cheetah might be helpful.

To the best of my understanding, Cheetah is similar to Blender, but is more accessible to novices. Sounds right for me, so I'm going to dive in to it.

I know that Dave is hoping to animate directly in SketchUp, so this is kind of off topic, but hopefully helpful to somebody.

Dave,

You've made good progress towards your goal, and educated me in the process. I, um, hadn't discovered Outliner yet. So you've encouraged me to follow your lead in this direction.

Pilou, thanks for the link to Cascadeur! It looks great. Not available for Mac yet though, so that will slow me down. Perhaps this is a good enough reason to fire up Windows again.

If either of you guys use Cascadeur I'd love to hear your reviews.

Good thread Dave, keep it coming.

If we could get some of this fellow's characters....

https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/by/CRonoz?

... in to a T pose I could try animating them in Mixamo.

The artist is quite a prolific character creator! Nice job.

Thanks for this thread, some interesting stuff here!

I did the following animation, by the method described in the thread.

Hippy Man Goes Jogging In SketchUp

Hey all, here’s what I’m working on at the moment. The hippy commune campground was created in SketchUp. The jogging guy is a MakeHuman character who was animated in Mixamo, and then added to the scene in…

SketchUp Community (forums.sketchup.com)

However, I had to cobble together a number of different softwares to get it done.

It's interesting what you've achieved within SketchUp, though it does sound like more than a bit of work.

My guess for now is that while animating human characters in SketchUp is possible by various methods, most folks will find it more work than it's worth.

I've started wondering if it would be easier to reverse the procedure. That is, instead of trying to bring animated humans in to SketchUp, would it be easier to bring SketchUp models in to some software which is specifically designed for animating characters? iClone? DAZ? Poser? Blender? Something else?