Aha! That makes sense. Thank you very much Fredo for diagnosing my model's problem! Before seeing your fast reply I was experimenting further and noticed that when hovering the mouse over three of the rotation animations in the timeline, the entire Animator GUI temporarily disappears. I could click in empty space (in the SketchUp viewport) and the chosen rotation would be selected and the GUI would reappear. I could then delete the rotation. After deleting the three rotations with this odd GUI behavior, the rest of Animator started working as expected. For all three of those rotations, I had used a temporary piece of geometry to be able to select the pivot point easily. Then I later deleted those "temp" objects. I did not correlate the beginning of the strange behavior with my having deleted those three rotation-pivot key objects.

Lesson learned, thank you. I will simply hide those pivot objects in the future.

• Tom

I've encountered an Animator problem (in v1.8a) that I encountered once or twice with v1.7d, where the editor and player become mostly unresponsive. In editor mode, clicking or dragging in the timeline has no effect other than to update the digital time text in the upper GUI area (the red timeline cursor does not move, no changes occur in the SketchUp viewport corresponding to camera or object movements); trying to render an animation causes the red frame rectangle to appear in the SketchUp viewport but the animation settings dialog box (for setting frame rate, selecting video formats, etc. plus the button to start the rendering) does not appear; clicking the green Play button seems to do nothing (no movement of blue cursor in timeline, nothing happening in the SketchUp viewport) other than toggle the button to become the Pause button (and clicking the Pause button reverts it back to the green Play button, but again has no effect on the timeline or viewport).

Here is a file that is exhibiting this behavior for me.

Through some experimentation, I found that if I disable the animation of object movements (but leave other actions enabled, in particular camera movements), then both the timeline behaves normally, and the render-animation mode displays the expected settings dialog box. If I disable camera movements but enable everything else, it still behaves badly (the timeline is mostly dead, the render-animation mode does not display the settings dialog box, the Play button does not do much).

When I encountered this a couple of weeks ago with v1.7d I'm not sure what I eventually did to get past the behavior. I might have simply resorted to a previously saved copy of the SketchUp file and then re-created what I wanted (and somehow managed to avoid the behavior until today).

If I open an older SketchUp file, Animator's GUI behaves normally - so it's not something that has somehow globally broken Animator. It seems to be something in the data of a particular SketchUp file. I have unintentionally triggered the behavior by opening an old version of the above linked file (which was behaving OK at the point I opened it), and then fiddling around in Animator - change some camera start/duration settings for example. BAM this opened file has begun exhibiting the broken behavior. Sigh.

I uploaded a more complete version of my work-in-progress model to DropBox.
- Tom

Hi Fredo, I upgraded to the new Animator 1.8a - WOW a huge improvement in performance! Thank you very much for making the enhancement, and providing it so soon. A complex model (about 2x the content of the model I linked in a prior reply) that previously required four or five seconds to update the viewport any time I dragged or clicked the cursor in the timeline, now allows moderately smooth dragging of the cursor in the timeline - nice, very usable! When playing the animation of that model within the extension it renders faster by a factor of 10x frames per second (from one frame per four seconds, improved to three or so frames per second with v1.8a).

I still have some slight trouble creating a rotation motion within the sample model I linked in a prior reply, I cannot seem to use the mouse to establish the rotation sweep angle. But I can get it to work by clicking on the rotation point, and then using the properties dialog box to enter a numeric value for the rotation (which I could not get to work with v1.7d). Also, the screen updating when selecting the object to be animated, and the ability to orbit and pan around the model while in that mode, is MUCH improved. Thank you again!

• Tom

Hello again, and apologies for spelling the name "Fred" in my prior reply - I meant to enter Fredo. I uploaded a copy of my moderately complex model to DropBox, about 69MB file size. It has 750 component instances, 380K faces, and 730K edges according to SKetchUp's Model Info window.

I am trying to cause the top-level group named "SSA-All for Azimuth" to rotate. That group represents most of the geometry in the SketchUp file. Below the base of the main group is a small cylindrical electrical connector socket. A short vertical edge and a horizontal disc are positioned below the electrical connector. That vertical edge (and disc center-point) represents the axis about which I was trying to cause the "SSAA-All for Azimuth" group to rotate. Performance issues were making that effectively impossible for me with Animator v1.7d.

Hi Fred, thanks for considering the concerns I mentioned. I will post a more complex model but I lost power last night and thus can't use my normal computer yet.

How do people with somewhat complex models cope with interactive (GUI) performance of Animator? I am trying to do some object movements in a model with about 700 component instances, 380K faces, and 730K edges. The GUI response is super slow, on an iMac 5K model (32GB RAM) that's just a couple of years old. With Activity Monitor running, SketchUp consumes about 30% of CPU when Animator's GUI is "doing something" such as letting me select an object to be the target of motion. By the way, regular SketchUp performance is totally fine when dealing with even more complex models on this same computer (e.g., a model with 2K component instances, 1M faces, 2M edges will pan and zoom and orbit very smoothly, perhaps 20 frames per second or so).

For the past hour or so I have tried unsuccessfully to create a motion sequence where a compound object (a group with many nested groups and components) rotates. I activate the motion tool, and select the object that I want to rotate (which becomes blue). That takes a few seconds for Animator to highlight the objects to which I'm pointing with the mouse, but it's tolerable.

Then in the GUI I try to click the ROTATION button. It takes the GUI about ten (10) seconds between when I first hover the mouse cursor over the button, and when the tool-tip for ROTATION appears. A similar delay occurs whenever re-pointing the mouse and hovering over another artifact in the Animator GUI - it takes ten seconds or so for the GUI to respond to the new mouse position. After clicking the ROTATION button, I then try to select the object that defines the rotation, and then set the rotation sweep angle. Here I fail.

Every time I move the mouse, it takes 20 to 30 seconds before some object under the mouse (or under where the mouse WAS, when I had been moving the mouse) is shown in orange. Any little movement of the mouse causes the GUI to think for another 20 to 30 seconds. The Activity Monitor utility shows ~30% CPU busy during such times. I am training myself to just not touch the mouse any further until Activity Monitor shows CPU at background level, so that I know the Animator GUI is truly idle.

So I try to click the mouse when I think I am pointing the mouse at the desired point on the desired reference object (which is shown in orange), and the GUI has settled down (not drawing anything new) and Activity Monitor shows the CPU usage to drop to background. Again, this is 20 to 30 seconds after any recent mouse movement. (Thus it is super painful to try to select the reference point for the rotation! If I need to orbit and pan and zoom, OUCH! Super super slow, 20 to 30 seconds lag every time I do something with the mouse, before the GUI responds with a repositioned model.) After clicking on the reference point of rotation I cannot get the Animator GUI to recognize any subsequent clicks and mouse motion as indications of the angle I want the rotation to sweep. Instead of activating the red sweep protractor, I end up inadvertently reselecting a new reference rotation point. Or so it seems; the red sweep protractor never appears with a complex model and super slow GUI.

I have tried using an extremely simple model to understand how the Animator GUI operates to define a rotation. That works OK, very quick. I can get a little box to rotate. But attempting to apply the same actions, slowed down by a factor of 100 or so in a complex model, just does not seem to work.

What I will experiment with is creating a super-simplified version of my actual model. Use that simplified version to define the Animator actions. Then replace the simplified objects with their full-detail versions. Hmm, I cannot delete the simplified object, because that is what Animator keys its actions to. But perhaps I can hide the geometry of the simplified version, and paste in the detailed geometry?

Suggestions appreciated! Animator seems amazingly capable, but using it on a moderately complex model is very frustrating due to performance.
- Tom

Is there a trick to cause Animator (v1.7d) camera paths to approximate those generated by SketchUp itself when changing scenes? The circular camera path choice in Animator's GUI yields very different paths than SketchUp's native path in my experiments. Animator's circular paths unpredictably seem to swoop through the defined points. The attached SketchUp file demonstrates the difference that I'm struggling with. Here is what I see in the example file between the first and second camera positions: Animator's camera passes through the interior of the large rectangular box, whereas SketchUp's path rotates counter-clockwise remaining well outside of the box. The path between positions two and three are also quite different between Animator to SketchUp.
Camera Path Test - SketchUp vs. Animator
I have seen fredosix's YouTube video that purports to show how close the SketchUp and Animator paths are, but that path fidelity is not my experience. So far I've mostly been using Animator's linear choice because it's the most predictable. I would love to eliminate the bounce inherent to linear paths, but the circular (and to a lesser degree the bezier) path settings seem rather crazy.

Hi Anton, thank you for the compliment. Your extension and its physics engine are fantastic and (sometimes) maddening. One area I really do not understand is how the extension works for connecting joints. In some situations it behaves fine: I click on a joint which turns blue, I shift-click on a body which turns green, done. Repeat the same click and shift-click sequence on another joint and another body, done. That's great.

But other times, joints seem to auto-connect to surprising bodies, or change their connections when I attempt to re-connect different joints. I recall in older versions of the plugin there was some kind of connect-closest-joint feature which I cannot now locate in the GUI. I wonder if there is some remnant of that which activates under certain circumstances? Perhaps joint connections are troublesome when there are many joints and bodies in close proximity (which I am doing lately)? Here is a screen capture with a body selected, showing that dozens of joints have become connected to it:

The kind of maddening behavior I'm experiencing tonight is: I click a joint (turns blue), I shift-click a body (turns green). OK. Do that two or three times with nearby joint-body combinations. OK. Then as a sanity-check return to the first combination: click on the first joint, and automagically it is now connected to some other body or bodies, not the one I had set a few moments earlier.

I must not understand how to operate the connect-joint GUI. I'm on a Mac with OS 10.12.6. When the joint connection tool is activated, the hint along the bottom of the SketchUp workspace window says to use CTRL, SHIFT, or both to connect/disconnect. The CTRL modifier causes a pop-up menu to appear with two choices, Disconnect all joints, and Exit. Is that expected? The SHIFT modifier does not always allow me to select the desired object, which I don't understand. In the following screen capture I cannot select the body which has a dashed-magenta outline:

In case it's hard to see, the dashed-magenta body is just below the green-outline body. I am trying to disconnect the selected (blue) joint from the green-outline body and connect it to the dashed-magenta outline body. Shift-clicking on the dashed-magenta body simply causes the dashed-magenta outline to appear and disappear, with each shift-click. The green-outline body remains green.

Shift-clicking on the green body yields confusing results which would take a page to describe, so I will stop here for now. I really hope to understand how I can be in 100% total manual control of how joints and bodies connect. There must be some limitations in what can connect to what that are not apparent in the GUI. I realize that the dashed-magenta outlines represent potentially-connectable objects. Why are only some objects potentially connected, and not others? (Even for a set of objects that are all at top-level in the model hierarchy.)

By the way, thanks for the tip about using a fixed joint rather than a hinge. However, the fixed joint has behaviors that make me prefer the hinge joint for this application. The fixed joint results in a much floppier flexible simulated cable (at least on my computer) compared to a hinge/angular-spring), and I prefer the somewhat stiffer behavior with the hinge. Also, if the simulation lives long enough for 3 to 5 rotations with the fixed joint the cable strips eventually begin to tilt and oscillate sideways and eventually explode the model (which looks pretty cool but is not exactly the goal!).

I'm hoping for advice on how to improve a model that attempts to simulate a thin flat flexible cable that is coiled or wrapped within a hollow rotating drum. Despite hours and hours of experiments, I cannot avoid SketchUp crashing (bugsplat) after about 2 to 2.5 rotations of the drum. I'm using MSphysics 1.0.2 with SketchUp Pro 2017.3.

[Update on Wednesday morning: As an experiment I changed the collision shape of the cable strips (see below) from compound to box, and that often avoids the crash. Sometimes the simulation even lives long enough to run 7 rotations clockwise and then 7 rotations counter-clockwise. Gravity can be enabled at about 1/300 time steps and higher, even.]

Here is a copy of the model file:
Viking Lander for SSAA FCC Animation Bare.skp

And an image of the general arrangement:

The model is scaled up 10x from some actual hardware I am trying to simulate (scaled in the hope of avoiding numerical issues in the simulation caused by the very thin cable). The cable (in the model) is about 30 inches wide and 0.1 inch thick. I have modeled the cable as a series of about 250 thin strips hinged to one another. One end of the cable is anchored to a hinge on a stationary hub (set to be static, tinted green in the above image) at the center of the drum. The other end of the cable is anchored to a hinge that is on the wall of the hollow gray drum. In its initial configuration the cable wraps three times around the stationary hub. The goal is to drive a motor to rotate the drum clockwise six or so full rotations. The flexible cable is intended to gradually unwrap from around the stationary hub, accumulate loosely around the inner face of the drum after three or so rotations, and then re-wrap about three times around the stationary hub in the opposite direction from the initial conditions. There is one motor controller - click it to the left (-1) to rotate the drum in the clockwise direction.

I am not very fussy about the hinge joints between the individual cable segments; the goal is to represent a lightweight cable that can flex a fair amount, with a mild tendency to straighten. I have tried friction and both types of spring hinges, with all sorts of parameter settings. Some hinge types make the model explode (which is comical to watch). Others seem to more-or-less behave OK except the cable is not as flexible as I would like. And of course the crash of the software; I'm not sure what aspect of the physics simulation is causing that - hinges or collisions or what. I have disabled gravity and friction for all active bodies. I have tried various settings of continuous-collision and Update-Timestep; the simulation usually survives longer (in simulated time) with higher time steps (e.g., 1/240, 1/480 etc.).

Both the cylindrical stationary hub and the hollow drum are modeled as a set of solid groups or components, with the individual pieces being convex. (The stationary hub's segments have some concavity due to two small raised flanges. I'm not sure if this is causing trouble. I used MSphysics feature to show collision wireframes, and what is rendered looks OK to me. I could delete those flanges.) There are also three thin curvy bend-guards to prevent the flexible cable from being bent too tightly at either end. Those guards are also modeled as a set of convex elements.

As a plus I would also like to eliminate the narrow visual gaps between adjacent cable strips (which seemed necessary to avoid corners of adjacent strips colliding and thus preventing joint bends). However, the main goal is to avoid the software from crashing as the simulation executes.