Auto generated fly-through

SketchUp Feature Requests
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1

I am looking for a tool/extension that will auto generate a large fly-through for me. Let me explain…

The end goal is to create a video that will start off looking directly down on my object and then spin around the object at decreasing angles with the goal being to catch the object at almost every angle possible. Then export the video to an image set so I have a large set of images that capture virtual every angle of the target.

I know that I “could” do this by making a large amount of scenes for each spiral around the target. The problem with this technique is that it is extremely time consuming and that in the end I would just be “eyeballing it”. The video needs to go down about 5 degrees after each rotation around the object.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a tool/extension that can do this or walk me through a technique that would reduce the task of creating hundreds of precise scenes?

2

I’m sure that there is a plugin for something like this … I was able to put together a simple one to generate the 450 scenes in the attached model (from BeAMZ’s 3Dwarehouse page):

eiffel_tower_detailed_1_.skp (814.5 KB)

The code I used:

require 'sketchup.rb'
class SampleAnimatedOrbit
  @@r = 450.0
  @@a = 0.0
  @@b = 85.0
  def nextFrame(view)
    x = @@r * Math.cos(@@b * Math::PI / 180.0) * Math.cos(@@a * Math::PI / 180.0)
    y = @@r * Math.cos(@@b * Math::PI / 180.0) * Math.sin(@@a * Math::PI / 180.0)
    z = @@r * Math.sin(@@b * Math::PI / 180.0)
    view.camera.set([x,y,z], [0,0,85], [0,0,1])
    view.show_frame
    Sketchup.active_model.pages.add
    @@a += 15.0
    if(@@a > 360.1)
      @@a = 0.0
      @@b -= 5.0
      if(@@b < 0.0)
        @@b = 85.0
        return false
      end
    end
    return true
  end
end
UI.menu("Plugins").add_item("Animated Orbit") { Sketchup.active_model.active_view.animation = SampleAnimatedOrbit.new }