Fading One Object and Making Another Appear

Hi All,

The project that I’m working on consists of a large protein model and a two smaller models that fit into the protein’s pocket. I’m creating an animation where, ideally, one of the smaller structures would fade away and then the second structure would appear in its exact place, similar to a PowerPoint fade and appear action. I’ve uploaded a screen shot to show you what I mean.

I can’t find a way to make this a smooth transition. The fog tool seems to affect everything on the screen (I want the protein to stay showing the entire time), so that won’t work. Is there another tool that I might be overlooking?

Any guidance you could provide would be much appreciated!

Many thanks,
Meredith

I would make that transition using a video editor instead of trying to do it in Sketchup directly. If you’re not showing it moving, you could use simple PNG image exports to do it.

Thanks, DaveR! I’m completely new to video editors. Are there any particular programs that you recommend? Also, what do you mean by PNG image exports? The animation would not be moving as the smaller structures fade in and out.

PNG is a raster image export file type. similar to JPG but without the same compression so the image quality tends to be better.

You may already have a basic video editor installed on your Mac such as iMovie. That would do the trick. Or you can get something like Adobe Premier Pro or others. I don’t have a specific recommendation, though.

The basic process would involve importing the images and applying a transition between them.

You can do hard switches. One is hidden, the other becomes visible. This happens at the end of the scene transition, if you have the scene set to remember hidden geometry, or set to remember visible layers (and have the object groups on layers that will go hidden and visible for the correct scenes.)

I played a little with moving section planes, and was able to get a “wipe”. But you need a series of scenes which has the section “wiping” plane successively moved to “wipe out” the object. It is tedious. (And I was also having trouble getting the scenes to remember the position of the section plane object. It worked between the first and second scenes, but not thereafter.)

I think that the only way to do fading within SketchUp, is if the object is subject to a different material in each scene. Or, changing the opacity of the objects’ materials. Towards opaque for one, towards transparent for the other. Again this is tedious manual creation of many transition scenes, many copies of the objects, with many copies of their materials (each with a slightly different opacity setting.)

The native animation is basically a preview of the Pro animation export feature. It really is only meant to do camera movements.

So, you’ll definitely need to look at some of the animation extensions. Most especialy if you are running the Make edition.

Thanks, Dave and Dan! I tried at least 5 different free video editors (unfortunately iMovie is no longer free) and the only one that was able to give me the transitions I needed was Shotcut. Some of the other editors would allow transitions, but only so much as fading the screen in or out to black which is not what I was looking for. Shotcut allowed me to slice up the animation, place them on separate layers, and then fade out and in simultaneously, adjusting the opacity rather than resorting to a black screen.

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