I have been a Sketchup user for years and have often wished for the option of selecting motion types between scenes in Sketchup. I would like to have linear (which is all I have currently), smooth, and ease in and ease out. I don’t know how hard this would be to create but it would go a long way to making my and the rest of the Sketchup community’s work look much more professional.
Well, Trimble has had 13 years to improve, or even attempt to upgrade, how scenes, transitions, and animations work. Perhaps within the next 13 we’ll see some of these requested and useful features added. If the AI-jobpocalypse hasn’t consumed us all before then that is.
Maybe if enough of us complain Trimble will do something about it. It just can’t be that hard. I use DaVinci Resolve for compositing my Sketchup animation frames. It boasts a host of high-end tools, among them the ability to control motion type. And this app is absolutely FREE.
In my experience, I don’t think the loudest or most often cited requests are the ones that get prioritized. Minor fixes and upgrades just aren’t sexy enough to entice new subscribers. Buzzwords like AI Diffusion and Enhanced Materials sound a lot better. And I know for sure no one has been arguing for those (perhaps because they’re new features rather than ‘missing’ features).
It isn’t always - you are using a more scaled down free version with features locked out.
By comparison SketchUp has SketchUp for web which is a similar deal.
I use Sketchup Studio!
I mean resolve - only the basic one is free.
Tons for features for free in my opinion.
Many people would say the same about SketchUp for web
But anyway, let’s not focus on problems, let’s focus on solutions - which is easy if you are using Resolve to composite and edit.
If you increase the framerate output for the animation to the max in Sketchup (and/or incresase transition time) then you can generate additional frames which will allow you far more control in resolve itself.
if you set your output to 120fps then you can speed up any part of the clip and slow it down - upto 4x (for an ease in/out for example) using retime curves in Resolves
This means you can speed up and slow down a very long pan or clip without any quality loss - allowing you to slow down for important areas or speed up to traverse faster.
If 4x slow-mo isn’t enough, just double the transition time before you export and give yourself 8x overhead.
Personally I export as PNG images sequences - SketchUp’s MP4 compressor (on windows anyway) is pretty poor.
What happens to render time in Sketchup?
More frames takes longer of course!
SketchUp is very lightweight, so a 4 minute render versus a 1 minute one for a video isn’t the end of the world.
if you do lots of animation you could also have a look at some of the visualisation tools - Twinmotion for example is designed for archviz animation and is free to use as long as you turn over under $1mil a year
If you want to experiment with scene transitions, you would simply export to a different programme. SketchUp is designed for 3D modelling, not video editing.
Thanks for the tips.