Record your moves and export them as a set of images to create an animation Català - Castellano - Deutsch We saw on a previous post how to create an animation using the Flightpath.rb plugin. If what we want is to create a walkthrough, the Camera Recorder Plugin works better (at least for me). With this Plugin by Chris fullmer, you can walk through the mode using the walk tool from sketchup, and record the moves and get them exported to a series of images. See the video where Chris Explains how to use this Plugin.
SketchUp animations exports are pretty bad in quality, how to improve that? Català - Castellano - Deutsch I had to export an animation for a recent project at school, and the regular exports from SetchUp were way to bad in quality. So I set myself to try to find a better way to do that. A bit of research on the internet showed me that if you export the animation as individual images and compile them on a movie file, the results should be better. Following some of the advice from Colin Holgate on this thread I exported my different scenes as series of JPEGs (I didn't realise it was better to export as PNG, I read the thread to quickly). The export resolution as 2048 x 1152 for a 16:9 widescreen format. Colin on his post explained he exported at 4096 x 2304 px, but my machine is old and I was time pressed to finish this, so i had to sacrifice quality for time. Also, the methodology is slightly different, since he was exporting from a Mac and I was doing it from a PC. In any case, the steps I followed were these:
Configure the Animation so it does not pause on each scene (see this post about it)
Export the Animation ( I used export as JPEG and quality 2048x1153px, ideally you want to export a bit higher quality and PNG format)
Reduce the Exported Images to a lower resolution (I reduced them to 853 x 480px)
Compile the images in a Movie file using Quicktime Pro
Combine the different scenes and add credits + music using Adobe Premiere Pro
This is the video after following these steps.
As you can see, the quality is still not impressive. This is due to several reasons:
I exported as JPG by mistake instead of PNG
I should have exported the original images in higher quality to reduce the flickering of lines
It was my first time using Premiere, so I had no idea which settings I was using.
As you see, I am still a newby on this, I just wanted to share the work done. Anyone who has some advice on how to better attempt to get a high quality animation out of SketchUp that is still manageable in size, feel free to comment.
Do you need to create a flythrough animation in SketchUp? Use this plugin to set up the scenes. Català - Castellano - Deutsch The Flightpath.rb Plugin allows you to easily create fly through type of animation. It is very simple to use and has several options to set the target of the camera.
If you want to do a fly through sort of animation, you probably want to use the first option, which basically creates an animation where the camera follows the path (it basically uses the next node or vertex of the path as the camera target). For other sort of animations (like the one I am going to show on the next post) you can use the other three options which basically let you choose if the camera points to a single target all the time, if it changes target on a straight line from one point to another, or if the target moves also on a second path.
The Plugin can be downloaded here for free. There is a newer version of the plugin called Flightpath 2, also available at Smustard, it costs 7$, but I haven't tested it.
This is an open question, not a solution. Is there a Plugin for that? Català - Castellano - Deutsch I've been asked if there is a way to export the SketchUp layers when exporting to AutoCAD as 2D drawing. All my Google searches have been useless, so here comes the question in case someone can help with this. Is there a Plugin to Export as 2D Drawing from SketchUp to AutoCAD and get the geometry to keep the layers from SketchUp?. Right now the only thing that seems possible is to separate the geometry in Cut Edges and Profile Edges. SO please, if anyone knows how to do this share it here! THanks
Another curved surface creation Plugin. SketchUp is becoming more powerful day by day. Thanks to TIG this time! Català - Castellano - Deutsch Need to extrude an edge following two contour edges? A new Plugin by TIG will do it for you. The "Extrude Edges by Rails" plugin developed by TIG allows you to select the edge to be extruded and the two rails to use as extrusion path. On the following example, see how from the three curved lines shown on the upper picture, I created the surface on the lower picture. Pretty cool ha!?
To use it (after installing the plugin) go to Plugins-->Extrude Edges by Rails. Just a bit of advice before running it, the example shown here took more than 5 minutes to be created (I am running a 3 year old Laptop 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2Gb of Ram). At some point I though the computer was hung, but it didn't, just be patient.
Record your moves and export them as a set of images to create an animation
