@tt_su said:

So, you created the animations in your videos with your own animation script?

Yes for the cameras, not for the trains that are moved by Christina's Railroad plugin.

@unknownuser said:

Have you published it anywhere other in that comment here? GitHub?

No. Its only few lines of code, that could/should be optimized... and adapted to custom needs. If any of the good developers that are here wants to improve it to make a more complete library it may be great...
In fact I think those features are really missing to SU.

@eneroth3 said:

By 'Translate camera', do you mean moving the camera relative to the train but without rotating and by 'Rotate around selection' the current behavior?

Hi Christina,
Easier to explain with sample. Here are some functions I used, to be called at each frame.
Feel free to integrate/customize/mix as you want within your plugin.

Here is the ruby file:
camera_animation.rb

And samples:

rotate around

target

follow

Pascal

Hi Christina,
Thanks for the fix for small tracks. It works great.
I played a little bit with the SU camera target and eye attributes and put the code to be executed between frames.
Here is a sample of what can be obtained with that :

It’s very simple code, but hardcoded, and no idea of any user interface.
I will try at least to “package” some functions so they can be called easily from railroad at each frame call.
Basically I’m thinking of :

• Follow selection
• Rotate around selection
• Zoom in / Zoom out
• Translate camera
  With any train that can be selected as any other object.
  If others want to play and add more detailed/fun rolling stocks, here is the basic Lego pack used in this video to unzip in the Plugins directory (simple track + locomotive and freight):
  ene_railroad.zip

Yours
Pascal

@tt_su said:

"This video is private"

Oops, is it better now ?

@eneroth3 said:

I've also been working on adding the new references in the balise code. last_run and last_train is really simple but I was wondering how you imagined the custom data. It's quite hard to save it between sessions if it contains other classes than what can be written as attributes (trains for instance). Is it enough to save the custom data within the session only?

There is no problem for me if the balise states/variables are not saved from one session to the other. Maybe I would prefer if the code typed into advanced animation dialog could be saved, it would be great.
In fact I’m looking for the best way to prevent from collisions… I did not found yet the ideal way.
Maybe I missed another wish, a function or track property that will return if another train is already on the same track ? or a kind of special balise that can act as a signal based on where trains are.
I have used last_run and last_train to reduce speed of current train and accelerate the previous one if time between 2 trains is too small. This is already a cool way to regulate traffic, but It looks to be insufficient when two different tracks merge into one. If you have any idea.

Here is the track that makes strange result with short tracks.
custom track directory
Yours
Pascal

Hi Christina,
Thanks for your answers. Take your time. I take the opportunity I'm on vacations to play !
Yours
Pascal

Hi Eneroth,

Thanks again for this amazing plugin and the add of custom code at each frame.
I’m playing like a kid with its new toy.

Here are some suggestions/ideas for improvements. Feel free to discard…

I created a custom track (Lego type) with small gauge (0.084m) and scale. Do not know if this is link to this scale but then I got sometime strange behavior when adding new tracks from webdialog:

• Can’t create even straight tracks of less than a length (60cm) without getting ties drawn in the opposite direction of the rails.
• For slips, tracks at each end are drawn over the slip, not externaly
• Do you want a copy of tracks I made to test or this is something you already seen ?

Not sure you can do something with this, but when placing an object (track, train, …) , cant zoom with the mouse wheel until it is pressed one to activate orbit tool. This is not the case with other SU tools.

I replaced default signals. Will wait for the customization doc. One thing is I’m not sure why you need left and right template. Why not to place/rotate within the tool.

When working on complex models, it should be great to be able to change the type of multiple tracks at once. (select many and change the type) in place of doing this one by one.
Would like also a way to force reloading and redrawing tracks when template has been changed.

Regarding camera, maybe a fixed point but with eye following a train would be interesting.

Last, I played a lot with balises. This is the most interesting part. I added 3 instance variables to the balise class to be able to build with the balises a kind of auto-controlled circuit to avoid collisions and add more trains to the same circuit.
These I think may be useful :

• Last train : to be able within a balise code to access to the previous train that passed the balise (and not only the current one)
• Last run : time the balise was last activated. I use this to control spacing/speed between trains
• Custom status : a variable to store a user state for each balise

Yours
Pascal

I asked this to my-self often and did not find the answer. So I choose for my script to offer a free version with few limits and a full version for 10 euros. Some are saying its expensive, and others that price is too low, but at least those who like the free one and wants the full one do not have to think about how much they have to donate

Yes, yes, yes. Great !!!! Like it.

Wow,
Your moving too fast !
My idea was at least at the beginning to be able to export as obj file the geometry of each image and generate the cmd line to render, and to be able also to export as 2D SU image (but with support of styles, shadows, custom size...) things that are not supported when using integrated make avi file from SU. Code for this exists in many plugins.
My personal final goal is to call Octane integrated render for SU, that is in beta now, but has in the todo list feature for future version to support calling the render from SU by script.

here is very simple example of code it could call

imagewidth = 1280
imageheight = 720
imagecompression = 0.7
imagetransparent = false
view = Sketchup.active_model.active_view
view.refresh
imagefilename=<string to build from model name + index>
keys = {
:filename => imagefilename,
:width => imagewidth,
:height => imageheight,
:antialias => true,
:compression => imagecompression,
:transparent => imagetransparent
}
view.write_image keys

Example of animation created by own script, would like to make same kind of result but with objects animated by your railroad system

edit
just for fun, after printing in 3D, the wheel built and rotated by a lego robot without contact

You can download SU2014 for free and setup it + Octane Plugin just to see if it change the performance on your environment.

@jorgensen said:

I tried to removed all plugins, and the script seems to run ok - but I still get the error.

Fixed (SU8).

@jorgensen said:

If I install octane render, the problem happens again (things take very long time), even with the Octane Viewport closed.

I'm also using Octane and cant see important additional delay to draw tree when viewport closed, Could you make a test with SU2014 as Octane Plugin is different for SU2014 ?

Yours
Pascal

@oxer said:

I found a plugin that it makes slow down the drawing of trees, BGSketchup_Composants.rb, with this plugin installed the drawing of tree02:Cypress takes 47 seconds, without the plugin installed the drawing takes 12 seconds, other example, the drawing of tree00:Default Generic Tree takes 6 seconds without plugin, with the plugin installed 55 seconds.
Mac OSX 10.9.4 & SU2014 with Tree Maker v1.10.11

Hi Oxer,
Great to know. Thanks for tests you made.
My understanding is that other plugins may add entities observers to Sketchup to be informed of any entity change. I'm not sure if this is the case for those you mentioned but I will have a look. When this is the case, each time a change is made to an entity, the third plugin is called. As drawing a tree make lots of change to entities within tree component, it add time due to all these calls.
Yours

Dear all,
Just fixed the issue with script error when loading configuration webdialog.
New file published in PluginStore and on my website.
Version is 3darcstudio_tree_v1.10.11a.rbz
Yours
Pascal

PS : do not understand why javascript is executed differently when called from SU8 and from SU2014, but...

@oxer said:

I came back to the v1.06.04 because this version draws the trees in few seconds (between 3 and 8 seconds in my computer), but there is one inconvenient, you lose the feature make grass and other features related with the Materials, present in the last version.

Hi Oxer,
The main difference is that the old version is making SU groups, not components.
Using components is really more efficient when you need to place many instances, and you got also a SU file that is lighter.
So yes time to draw with the new version is a little bit more slow to draw one tree (on PC), but a lot much faster to redraw 20 or more trees as only the component is rebuild, not all instances.
This was the reason I make this change to integrate features like grass.
But as I really have acceptable performance on PC/2014 (few seconds to draw most of the trees), maybe i have a specific issue of speed with Mac.
I will try to add few time logs to the next version so see what is slowing down the most.
Yours
Pascal

Dear all,
another tip to use tree maker with better performance, to place trees within large models:

• I build/change configuration of the tree in an new empty Sketchup model
• When I'm happy with the result, I convert it to proxy with the integrated tree maker proxy function
• Then I copy/paste this component (which is small) to the final model where I can make instances
• When all trees are in place and I want to render, i use "redraw all" in the final model, this can take some time if many trees, but have to do it only once before rendering
• I also use the proxies features of the renders when available (Thea, Octane, ...)
  Yours
  Pascal

Hi Jorgensen,

@jorgensen said:

I get an error when I try edit a tree

Did you try with the last version : 1.10.11 that is published in the Plugin store here or from this link :
http://www.3darcstudio.com/downloads/3darcstudiotree/3darcstudio_tree_v1.10.11.rbz
Download the file,
Setup using standard SU rbz extension install
After install, exit and restart SU
Did the error still occur ?
If yes let me know and we will try other tests. First time I see it, so I need more investigation.
Does anybody here also got the same error ?

@jorgensen said:

I guess it's a limitation of Sketchup, but I find the plugin hard to use then I have to wait this long every time

Regarding speed:

• on 2 different PCs I'm using, drawing a tree is less than 30s for the more complex one and less than 5seconds for the standard generic tree.
• be sure you close the Sketchup Outliner window: this is the main cause of slowness I have seen as SU try to refresh outliner for all geometry changes within scripts
• ensure also that additional plugins that checks for geometry changes (like render viewport) are not running while you are drawing a tree as they will try to update
• the script also runs a little bit faster on SU 2014.

Yours
Pascal

Hi Eneroth,
First thanks for this amazing plugin. I really appreciate the way animation is done and the "open" features that allows customization of all objects.
I have a wish and would like to know if this is something you could think of :
I would like to be able to run custom script at each image change, to be able to render images in external render. I've seen its possible to add points where external script is called, but adding them one by one for each image would be too long.
Just an idea...
Yours
Pascal

Hi Sukmoduto,
Did you try not to copy files from SU2013 plugin dir but downloading and installing new plugin version ?
Looks like you are using an old version not compatible with SU2014.
(Line 28 does not exist in liveIvy.rb of the last version).
Yours
Pascal