Controlling / Repeating Distance and Perspective

Is there a way in Sketchup Pro to lock down & repeat distance and perspective for any given component?

I am building a model that shows alternative locations for an oven in a baking center. We have shown it above counter and below counter. We have shown a view that puts the oven on the left side and one that puts it on the right.

What I would like to do is display these views as scenes to create sort of a flip book.
In flip books you want the viewers eyes to just focus on the salient change.
If the perspective angle or distance of view changes from scene to scene it’s harder for the viewer to discern just the changes.

Each of my four options exist as a component.
How would I go about locking down component location on the drawing?

Would I do this by making it a dynamic component and only controlling the position attributes?

If you were standing in the real room where this oven is, would you be able to see the oven in each of its proposed locations without moving? If so, I would use a combination of scenes and layers. I don’t think Dynamic Components would be useful.

There are also plugins that can set the view camera to the identical location, etc. in multiple scenes so that the view doesn’t jump when you change from scene to scene. I think @eneroth3 published one. I did a quick one once, but haven’t published it, I could share it if needed.

Hello, another solution would be to use the “position camera tool”. If you place a marker inside your component, even 10m away so that you can have a clear view on it, you can then use it as a reference point to position the camera. Note that you can also adjust the height offset before clicking on the point

HI Dave,

Actually I think you should be able to see most of what a wall composition looks like from the same spot in the room.

Getting to a decision about where to place a cabinet pull, however, would benefit from more of a flip book type approach. In this phase of decision making we need to find out whether they want one pull or two or whether they want the pull in the frame or in the panel.

What I am trying to do with each scene is isolate just that issue so the customer does not have to ask themselves “What am I looking at?”. I only want them looking at the handle location.

I have never figured out how to manipulate cabinet pulls elegantly without zooming in really close. It is this zoom & pan that complicates the flip book.

Thanks Paul.
I am new to this. Will pay more attention to “position camera tool”

I would love to see that plugin if you could share it.

Will see what eneroth3 has as well.

Thanks!

You can create multiple scenes with the same camera position. Just select the previous scene and create a new one. You could have four different instances of your over or a drawer pull on different layers. the swap which layer is visible between scenes. For example, you might have ‘left oven’, ‘right oven’, ‘top oven’, and ‘bottom oven’. Scene 1 has ‘left oven’ visible, the others off. Scene 2 has ‘right oven’ visible and the rest off and so on.

Are you showing the client the SketchUp file or exporting images to show them in a document or something?

Am still working out the presentation part.
I have spent some time on LAYOUT but not enough to get good at text management.
My protocol so far is to do a screen grab and drop the Sketchup drawing into Vectorworks CAD then create a PDF.

Running a cabinet shop pretty much sucks up most of my life so my ability to become good at sketchup is limited.

I thinking I would like to make my presentations to customers via a video online.

That sounds like less than optimal workflow; especially for this sort of thing. I think it would be worth your hard-to-come-by time to get up to speed with LayOut. You can do what you need with SU and LO and make it so it’s easy to make adjustments as needed. You could also export images from LayOut and make a slide show.

You could make online presentations with screen sharing and use LO with a switch to SU if you want to make changes on the fly with the client watching. Or you could export an animation from SketchUp to use for a video presentation.

Here is is. Install using the extension manager. It will add two items to the extensions menu, “Sync All Scenes” and “Choose Scenes to Sync”. The former causes all scenes to match the current scene’s camera. The latter (admittedly somewhat tediously) offers the other scenes one-by-one and lets you choose the ones you want to match the current scene’s camera.

SB_camera_sync.rbz (1.5 KB)

I did this as a quick one-off because I sometimes set up matching scenes as @DaveR suggested and then later accidentally perturb the camera on some of them. With care that shouldn’t happen, but I sometimes don’t think about the camera before updating a scene to capture a new style or choice of visible layers.

Another option is to make your three scenes with one of the three separate oven components showing in each one by putting each oven on a separate layer. As described earlier. But you can take camera location out of the scenes so the camera will just sit wherever it is while the layers change visibility

Open the scenes window and uncheck the camera location box for each of those three scenes. Then the camera position will be unaffected as you move between those three scenes.

Is this what you are looking for?

http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/eneroth-relative-camera

The plugin lets you memorize camera positions relative to a group/component (relative to its internal axes to be precise) and the restore that camera but relative to another group/component. The example images show the corresponding view for two adjacent apartments.

That sounds just like what I am looking for.
Will download the plugin and report back.

Thanks so much for posting it!

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