SketchUp: Exporting an animation with Good Quality.

SketchUp animations exports are pretty bad in quality, how to improve that?
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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:
  1. Set up the animation scenes using the FlightPath Plugin
  2. Configure the Animation so it does not pause on each scene (see this post about it)
  3. Export the Animation ( I used export as JPEG and quality 2048x1153px, ideally you want to export a bit higher quality and PNG format)
  4. Reduce the Exported Images to a lower resolution (I reduced them to 853 x 480px)
  5. Compile the images in a Movie file using Quicktime Pro
  6. 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.
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SketchUp Plugins: Create a Fly through animation

Do you need to create a flythrough animation in SketchUp? Use this plugin to set up the scenes.
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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.
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How do you Export SketchUp Layers to AutoCAD?

This is an open question, not a solution. Is there a Plugin for that?
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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
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SketchUp Plugins: Extrude an Edge following two Rails

Another curved surface creation Plugin. SketchUp is becoming more powerful day by day. Thanks to TIG this time!
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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.

You can download the Plugin here. Thanks to TIG.
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SketchUp: Modelling a Terrain #01

What are the steps to follow to model a terrain in SketchUp? See them following this series of posts.
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The first thing we need to do to be able to model a terrain, is to have clean topographic lines. This task is definitely better done on a CAD drafting platform such as AutoCAD.
Ideally, we want to have topo-lines all connected, without gaps in them, and of course we want each of this topo lines to be at the right height. Getting this clean geometry is probably the most time consuming proces of modelling the terrain. See below for a "before and after" version of a typical topo file.



Once we have it, we just need to import the geometry to Sketchup and we are ready to start. To model the terrain, we need the SandBox tools. Although they come standard with sketchup, they need to be activated, so if you can´t see them, go to Windows --> Preferences --> Check that the box of the SandBox is Active --> Then go to View --> Toolbars --> Sandbox.

Before we proceed to use the sandbox tool to model the terrain, I strongly encourage you to use the Simplify Contours Plugin to simplify a bit the topo lines. Otherwise, the resulting terrain might be too heavy to handle.

Once we have done this, we simply need to select topo-lines, and click on the "from contours" tool in the Sandbox toolbar.


This will create the basic terrain. As you can see on the image below.


To represent it resembling a real life model I also added the sides and to be able to understand better how the terrain works, I used Chris Fullmer's "color by Z" plugin to paint the terrain. See below.



On future posts we will see how to add simple roads, how to place buildings, how to add vegetation, context terrain from Google earth, etc. I´ll try to use this same model for the other tutorials so anyone can follow them by downloading the file.
BTW, tomorrow is thanksgiving, so those who celebrate it, have a wonderful time with your families and/or friends. Don't get too crazy with the shopping deals...we are still on recession.
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AutoCAD: List of Objects

The list of all the AutoCAD object types. Links to the different categories of objects and relevant posts about them.
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Back in September I started the series "AutoCAD list of Objects". As the series is finished right now, I thought i would be good to have a main post that works as a directory for all of the posts of the series. So here are the links to all those posts.
Remember that you can access this typo of posts that work as a directory of the website by clicking on the "directory" link on the orange navigation bar on the header.

If you find any missing objects, please don't hesitate to contact me and I'll add them on the right category. Thanks!!
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AutoCAD: Updating Fields Automatically

A system variable controls how fields are updated, play with it if you are having trouble.
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My post about using fields in dynamic blocks has aroused some comments (mostly on the spanish version of the post) about the fact that the field of the sample block does not update automatically. I set myself to find why was that and if there was a solution.
This is the block I am talking about.The idea is that when you stretch the dynamic block, the field that shows its width should stretch too. Unfortunately this seems to not be possible, as fields require at least a "REGEN" to be updated. The research let me to discover the FIELDEVAL system variable, that actually controls how fields are updated. This are the options on setting the value of this system variable:
  • 0: Not updated
  • 1: Updated on open
  • 2: Updated on save
  • 4: Updated on plot
  • 8: Updated on use of ETRANSMIT
  • 16: Updated on regeneration
At least I didn't waste my time completely...and you get to learn something new too.

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SketchUp Plugin: Geometric Curve Smoothing

Another free form editing plugin for SketchUp. Who said sketchup could only handle boxy geometry??
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Editing curves and so called free form geometry is something important when we want to design buildings that are something more than a set of boxy shapes. Slowly, the ruby programmers are coming with more and more plugins to do this, turning SketchUp slowly into a great tool, too, for free form modelling.
The latest one I came across with, is the Geometric Curve Smoothing. What it does is better explained on the video below.



The plugin is still under development (currently version 1.1 is out). You can download this version via the author's page.
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SketchUp Plugins: Smart Push Pull

Push faces smartly with this plugin from a4chitect.
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The standard push pull tool doesn't give us sometimes the results we want when the geometry we have is not formed by perpendicular faces. If we have oblique adjacent faces to the one we want to push/pull. Let's see an example of what I mean. On the following model, we want to push the face colored in orange.


The standard Push Pull tool only considers the selected face, regardless of what type of geometry is adjacent to that face. The result would be something like this.


But if what we want is that the push operation understands that there is an oblique face "touching" the face we are pushing, we need to use the SmartPushPull plugin created by a4chitect. This plugin will allow us to get the following result without the need of complicated cleanups.



The plugin is still under development, so I'll just post the link to the Sketchucation thread where you will be able to download it and get the newest versions as soon as they are published.
One of the things you will notice is that the current version v0.26 does not delete the original face and lines, but this can be partially solved by using the "delete coplanar edges" plugin, that we saw on a previous post at CAD-Addict.


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Powerpoint: Batch Importing Images

How do you import at once a set of images into PowerPoint?
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I have never talked about PowerPoint here in CAD-Addict because it always feels it is a bit off topic. But the truth is that PowerPoint (or any similar version like its pen source counterpart - OpenOffice's Impress) is an important tool involved on the CAD work-flow, as the final tool used to present most of what we've done with other programs. So expect once in a while to find some posts about it from now on, specially now that at school I am using it more and more for my presentations.
Today, just want to describe an easy way to batch insert images in Powerpoint. This is useful to create simple presentations. Once we have created our presentation sheets, we might want to import them into PowerPoint at once.
To do this, you simply need to go to the insert tab (Office 2007) and click on Photo Album. Click on "select picture from File/Disk" to search for the folder were you have stored your presentation drawings and simply select the ones you want to include in your presentation. See the dialog box you will be dealing with below.


You can choose the layout you want for the inserted images, normally, fit to slide is for the use of doing a presentation of drawings the most adequate, but you could play with the other options in case you need it.
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Happy Halloweeen to everyone!

Just want to wish you all a happy halloween
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Either if you are from north america and feel it as something of your own, or if you are just enjoying it because you like to get a costume and go out.
I love this night, so I just want to share it with you. Enjoy it, and be safe!
Happy Halloween!!
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by Marti 1 comments

AutoCAD: List of Dynamic Block Objects

The list of entities/objects used in dynamic blocs.
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The last post on the series Lists of AutoCAD Objects. This time about the objects used in Dynamic Blocks, and links to relevant posts that dealt with some of them.
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