I am looking for a way to have some sort of directional arrows that indicate the location and view direction of a scene/camera view within my sketchup model. Ideally i want to have my top view showing where the scenes are taken and which direction they are looking.
Do that in LayOut. There are symbols included in the scrapbooks for that or you can make them in whatever style you like.
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Is there any interactive addon that shows those symbols in SketchUp model instead of LayOut?
No but there’s no reason you couldn’t model similar symbols and save them as components to place in your plan view scene.
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Have you looked at Advanced Camera Tools? I agree with @DaveR that the use of symbols is best done in LayOut but to get a specific view or camera, this method works well for me.
Here is the camera and the field of view cone:
Here is a drawn arrow aligned to the centerline of the view cone:
Not an add-on, but the native section planes can do this for you.
They do not necessarily need to cut anything, just be ahead of the objects you want to view.
And to limit them to bracket a certain part of the model, group that part and put it’s section plane inside the group.
I don’t think ACT will do anything with orthographic views, though, will it?
That said, is there a quick way to get that center line vector? The best I’ve come up with so far is to draw at least one diagonal line across the picture plane of the frustrum to get a center point to snap to. Then draw from the camera to that point.
Like this?
I used JS Camera Line (from SCF). The guidepoint at the left indicates where the camera was when I had it set to Parallel Projection and aligned with the building. You can see the guidepoint right on the bottom of the fascia.
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Yes, exactly the ticket! And that does seem to work with parallel projection.
That’s half way to what the OP is looking for. If the plugin had an option to place a face-me graphic symbol like the one shown, that would be most of it. The text content would be a lot more complicated.
I’ve been refreshing my memory, and doing research and experiments recently preparing to talk at 3D Basecamp. Despite over 50 years of doing photography and 20 of using SketchUp, one thing I only just realized is that all this time, SketchUp has been using the term Field of View incorrectly. The units of measure for FOV are distance (feet, meters) while Angle of View is measured in degrees.
What happens if you type 28mm?
Isn’t the FOV determined by the focal length of a camera/lens?
Yes, but that’s relative to what the film/image sensor size is. I haven’t made sense of what it does with focal length - Agh, in fact once I type in focal length, it won’t give it up and let me use degrees again.
Edit: Oh, you have to type “deg” not °. Also, Command-\ seems to toggle the reading in the VCB.
Edit 2: I think I’ve just come to the realization the SU is mixed up between horizontal and vertical angle of view in interpreting focal length.
(Sorry, don’t mean to get off topic - I’ve been meaning to start a new topic.)
SU differs from cameras in that the focal length and viewing angle are measured vertically, irrespective of the shape of the model window. In cameras the angles are calculated diagonally across the “film” frame.
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I can’t remember when, but thanks to this forum I learned that a while ago, gave up on using focal length in the VCB ever again, and been happily working with this understanding. After @MikeWayzovski 's question, I looked at it again and realized SU’s conversion between degrees and mm of focal length (if we’re talking about a standard 35mm film camera) is using a formula for the horizontal angle of view for a lens, which is wrong for how SU works.
Example: Type in an angle of view of 81.2° which is the vertical angle of view for a 14mm lens. What I see in my SU model is consistent with a 14mm lens view. SU will report that this is a 21mm lens*, but 81.2° is the horizontal angle of view for a 21mm lens, not vertical. I think someone encoded this function looking at the wrong number to work correctly. No wonder I was always stumped by the numbers I was seeing for focal length.
*I have at times gotten SU to toggle between reading out degr and mm in the VCB by repeatedly typing Command-, but I can’t always get it to do so. Anyone understand how that behavior works?
Check this thread:
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That’s one of the threads I was reading while doing research.