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Hi,
I am currently trying to figure out how I can come up with a sky system plugin with day and night cycles and my current rout is dealing with different style properties.
My initial plan was to animate the sky toggling thru scene tabs with code but this new approach you just created to change styles with code without transitioning thru pages is worth my attention big time.
Thanks for sharing this great idea and of course to the people that helped you make it better as well!
Hi,
With the 2nd and 4th images one can see a scene composition. This first one is nice but would have been nice to see the hotel as well. With the 3rd I can sourt of see why you decided to block the building with cars.
Cheers
Hi,
You entered this giveaway solo which if you translate your name from spanish to english it means 'alone' so congratulations for winning!
Hope your kids enjoy the game! 
Note: Sended you a PM explaining how to get the game.
Hi,
Please go to this link for more information.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=179&t=49115
Trying to get the most people that I can to participate.
Cheers!
Pid Contest!
Hi,
I recently won a code to activate steam product called 'Pid' and since I already bought that game the next best thing is to give it to a friend or to a sketchUcation member. Ok so the rule is to reply to this topic and tomorrow I will pick out of a hat the random winner.
You will need to have the Steam Client Software and have a free membership...Easy!
http://store.steampowered.com/
Also if you like this person is youtube channel please subscribe, he is the one that started the contest that I won. Also it will be the perfect place to see what the game is about.
Cheers
Is the rendering done in cinema4D for any chance?
Nice car concept!
Hi,
My recomendation is to try to portrait the damage of the existing model with painted textures first using 'Photoshop' and then you can add definition with modeling.
Be sure to search google warehouse to see how other people are making this types of models but above all check the 'Gallery' and 'WIP' on sketchUcation because I have seen some advance stuff there. If you want constructive feedback make you own 'WIP' thread to show the progress of your work.
Cheers!
Hi,
Thanks for the link that explained how to export videos as 'avi' format since I previusly didn't know how. Even though compiling the video as avi with After Effect resulted in little bit more quality than before the reality is that it is still not as good as exporting as 'swf' fotmat. I was using the default settings so maybe there is still room for improvments but not sure. Hopefully you will be satisfyed with how the video will turn out even though the swf file will look better.
Cheers!
I bet Calatrava used SketchUp with SimFonIA Animation Tools to design that! 
I enjoyed this series of videos thank you for sharing them!
I am glad we are having this conversation because it made me do some tests and I have found the real issue!...evil laugh ahead…HAHAHA!
Ok the images that 'SimFonIA Animation Tools' exports are truly HD so no issues there…The problem is when “VirtualDub” compiles it to video form, then the image loses resolution but it is still good quality video in my opinion. My test was to compile the images in the ‘c 
/ SATTemp’ folder myself using Adobe After Effects and the result was a perfect resolution!
The other problem that this created was that the format was swf which can't be used in 'Youtube'. This meant I used a converting software called 'Sothink SWF to Video Converter' and again the resolution went down although not as much as before. Then I tried using 'Fraps' to record the 'swf' video and it was better but it still took resolution away. I re-uploaded the resulting video to 'Youtube' as a test but both videos look almost identical in quality.
If you want to see the youtube test go to my channel and also I will leave a Drop box link if you are interested to see the SWF video quality.
http://www.dropbox.com/sh/x1gs5e0t3itf8ab/VixDKxjb-g
Hope this helps!
@dave r said:
I'm curious. what would this plugin of yours do?
What I am basically planning is to have animated day to night system like you would see in a game for example were the hours are accelerated or that you can click and access a specific hour. Maybe if I have the time I will ad a probability of raining to it. Also if I can figure a way to know when you are looking at the sun it will be cool to add sun flairs but all this is just an idea at the moment.
@dave r said:
How would it work?
Not 100% on this but I am pretty sure I will use lots of scene tabs to transition between sky colors using the 'sky' option on the style menu. I don't want to use an image with clouds already because I want to be able to animate clouds. For the clouds I have already tested painting them in Photoshop and exporting them as PNG files and they look pretty good. Making animated clouds look good takes a little bit more than just moving them because the cloud transform in shape density as well which to achieve this I will need to approach it like I did the wind in the rain plugin.
At night you will want to see the moon & stars and also the lighting should be lower. To make the lighting go lower you can have a black watermark image and use transparency to modify it and if you want bright light you use white image...I kinda used this when the thunder hit on the rain plugin. For the moon and stars again I will have to use PNG textures.
@dave r said:
Would it create a sky dome and paint a material on it?
No this could be an option but not the one I am thinking of.
@jean lemire said:
You can use a sky picture as a Watermark (read about Watermarks in the help) and then use a ground texture (grass or whatever) on a large face acting as the ground plane.
This would be the correct approach if you only want still images of you model and not have people interact with the model in real-time or make animation.
Cheers
I have uploaded a version with no sounds called keyscene_nosound.rbz
Does errors don't look good and I have no clue right now how to fix them but I'll keep an eye on them. Thank you for helping me figure this one out I really appreciate it.
Fortunately Sketchup has a sharing community in which case you can search "Sky Dome" in the following site;
I bet you can find a lot of options there so that you are not left empty handed.
You said that sometimes you needed to double click 'ENTER' to go to next menu and in occasions needing to reset for it to work and I think I might know why is this...When you hit 'Play' the button can't be focused because when you keep hitting enter its like you are re-hitting 'PLAY' which causes the timer to speed-up making the plugin not work if you keep hitting enter.
I solved this in my computer at least when adding the following code to start every time you hit 'Play'.
window.focus()
But maybe since you are using a Mac it is possible the Web Dialog isn't un-focusing the 'Play' button when you hit it.
If this is the case then I might want to consider not using the 'ENTER' key but rather the 'Spacebar' not sure. Anyways try manually un-focusing the 'Play' button and see if that solves the problem to be sure it is that in the first place.
Cheers!
Not even close to a stupid question!
This is a very good question and one that I am afraid to make the sky look just right won't be easy. Let me explain...if you want a sky texture mapped into a sphere correctly so that when you look around the sky doesn't stay fixed as it would if you used the 'Watermark Settings' in the style option menu then the sphere is UV's need to be properly unwrapped before applying sky texture. I say this because I tried projecting it initially and the result was that the texture looked stretched.
I am very interested to work on a possible plugin to have animated sky system with cloud layers and day slowly animating into night but like I said its probably going to be hard work. Again brilliant question and I will try to work on a possible solution in the future but in the mean time take a look at my other plugin called 'Rain' which allows you to have kind of a weather system inside SketchUp.
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=48846
Cheers!
@blueglass said:
My plan was to edit so that viewers would have the option of showing the names of the polyhedra (in the closed caption), but to have music rather than my voice for the sound track. Do you know how hard that would be with fraps?
Adding music is easy with a free software like 'Windows Live Movie Maker' or 'iMovie'. I know that fraps record internal sounds so playing a music while recording might be another way. Also a reason to use 'Windows Live Movie Maker' is to reduce the file size since the video 'Fraps' export is very high in size but doing this is very easy to do.
@blueglass said:
I would like to understand better why the quality goes down with what I'm doing,
Not so sure about this but let me point out that maybe it is the codec the video player use to display the animation. I for example used SimFonIA Animation Tools to export animations videos and while playing the exported video with 'VLC' video player I was getting significantly better resolution than playing the same video with 'Windows Media Player'. Regardless the animation looked way better inside SketchUp so using Fraps might be better, although if the machine can't handle real time playback because of the complexity then 'Fraps' is not an option.
Here is a video where I used 'Fraps' to record everything except when I show the animations because I used the export option from within Sketchup. Notice the diference in quality...Hope this shows that screen capturing might return better resolution.
You said you use 'Cam Studio' and that is fine if you are not recording real time animations because it might cause heavy video lag. That is why I recommended Fraps because it specifically designed to record CPU intensive playbacks as games and things like that. Note that 'Fraps' only records the view port window so it ignores anything else like the menus and stuff like that so it might be handy to keep 'Cam Studio' if capturing menus is necessary.
By the way it is really cool that a teacher is thinking outside the box to make learning fun!