Thanks Ron, your components are always highly appreciated!

Holy crap, those models are sick! The term "crowbaring Sketchup" is exactly right and my hat is off to you.

You couldn't pay me to attempt this, and if I did, I am sure it would end up terribly bad!

There is a remove flicker function in Primiere?! 8O

I have been using quicktime pro and fotomagico for my compositing and it is getting to be time to drop the $800 (ouch) for Premiere. And this remove flicker really works? wow.

Thanks Paul!

Thanks Paul for this.

Almost all my finished product involves animations so I am sure I'll learn something here. You must have a lot of patience to export at twice your desired size! A recent export of mine was 9750 frames@29.97 and it took something like 41 hours and that was at 1024 x 768 which was also my finished size! Needless to say, I broke it up into a bunch of smaller exports , but still.

Any reason why you use Tiff instead of PNG? I always thought PNG's gave you lossless exports with a smaller file size than Tiff.

The one thing I fight more than anything else is the dreaded moire. I wonder if you have any hints, short of avoiding moire prone textures, to minimize the flickering weirdness.

Thanks!

Good luck! Hopefully these pointers will eliminate, for you, some of the hassles I went through.

So, I recently went through all sorts of contortions to get a flythrough sequence to play on stand-alone DVD players and I figured someone might want these tips. My particular case involved a h.264 encoded .mov file. This file consisted of 6 smaller h.264 encoded sequences stitched together with a 5 sec .png still between each sequence. I was not attempting HDDVD, though that is the next experiment.

1. Use high quality DVD's. I started off using Memorex disks and they produced more coasters than anything useful. There is a great webpage rating and explaining DVD's here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
   I ended up using Taiyo Yuden 8x DVD-R FWIW

2. Turn your write speed down to 2x. This takes longer to write, but quality and reliability (esp. on stand-alone players) is much better.

3. Close out from all your programs while actually burning the DVD.

4. Make sure that you are using the proper frame size for encoding! In my case, I was attempting to maintain the original size of 1024 x 768, instead of letting my software encode at the DVD default, which is 720 x 480 (NTSC). While this produced DVD's that worked on every computer I tried them on ( Mac and PC, XP and Vista), they would not work on any of the 4 players I tried them on. Once I encoded at the default, everything worked fine.

For the gory details, you can check out here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=353645&highlight=kannonbal

Hope this helps someone.

I guess the kicker is as long as the component axis are the same

I use reload extensively and I am usually having to fiddle with the new component to get it right even though the original was how I wanted it.

Well, I think, and I hope I am wrong, that reloading components usually entails repositioning and/or resizing of the new component. It seems like sometimes they come in properly oriented, but I think that is more coincidence and luck.

Hopefully someone else knows something more.......

I'm not seeing the attachment.

and a couple more that I use a bunch.

http://lemog.free.fr/lemog_v5/index.php?cat=4&lang=english

http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/texture_colour/

Craig, you are the man, sir!

I will be very annoyed and distressed if Google would let a man of your caliber go. It is depressing that they let your contract expire.

No matter what, though, a man of your talents will have no problem finding interesting work.

Good luck, and I am pulling for you.

kannonbal

Done!

I hope to goodness they don't let him slip away; that would completely suck!

kannonbal

Well, I trashed every Sketchup plist, trashed the program again, and reinstalled.

Everything seems to be behaving (knock wood)

Thanks for the help, guys

kannonbal

Good news and bad news.......

Good news is the FBX export option is now available after reinstall!! Thanks Francois for that.

Now, however, 3DS export is non-functioning. When I choose 3DS as my export option and click the OPTIONS button, I get no window popup. Sketchup just sits there waiting for me to hit EXPORT. If I do hit EXPORT without attempting to change anything, I get the progress window, but it never starts the export. I get that blue/white barber's pole that indicates that it is thinking about it but a progress bar never starts and a file never shows up.

I tried trashing my plist to no avail.

This wouldn't be that big a deal to me except that VUE won't accept FBX files and it won't accept mac SKP files either, though it takes windows32 SKP files no problem.

This is so annoying.................

kannonbal

Thanks guys. I never have installed a non-english version but still no fbx export.

Thanks for the Francois, hopefully I can get this thing working.

kannonbal

I know this was discussed here a few weeks ago.

Wasn't there someone who no longer had FBX export as a 3D model export choice on their Mac?

I usually use 3DS but thought I would try a fbx and it is not on the list anymore.

I think I remember the solution being uninstalling Sketchup and then reinstalling.

Two stupid questions though.

Can I just trash the application and leave everything else (plists, component lists, etc) and then just use the new application?

Where can I download the application again? Do I sign up for another 8 hour trial version and then use my existing serial number? Do I have to contact Sketchup support?

I guess I am using version 5 to do this right now..................................

kannonbal

You are absolutely right. I, too, am a guide line fanatic.

However, I am talking about instances where the guideline, or geometry, may be fractions of an inch from a cardinal axis. It seems that SU weights the cardinal axis more for inferencing and it can be difficult to even get locked onto the guide line. Not impossible, but difficult and time wasting.

I work with very complicated models over 100's of acres. It is a regular occurrence that some geometry is close to, but not on, the main axis.

The inference engine, though usually very good, gives me fits when this happens. Especially when I can't zoom in enough to get the proper snapping because of clipping.

If you could hold a button down and geometry would inference but the the main red/green/blue wouldn't, or visa versa, I would find that feature very handy.

Edson, what are you using to open DWG's? I, too, have had limited success with edrawings, though not as bad as you are experiencing, but I haven't found a better solution.

"sniff, sniff..........feeling sorry for myself............"

Thanks Chris, you have managed to make the one thing on the planet that makes me regret not having a PC.

Sure sounds like you guys are having a fun time...........