Stationary camera recording

Hello Everybody!

I am looking for a plugin that would allow me to record a video from a stationery camera while I model as usual. Is there such a thing?

Thanks!
Josh

It sounds like what you are looking for is a screen capture program. I’ve used Camtasia for that for years and like it very much. I can record audio along with the video and the application includes a very powerful video editor.

https://obsproject.com/de/download

Yes, but i don’t want to record my screen. I want to record from a location of a static camera in the model to give the perspective of the model being constructed without all of the herky jerky camera rotations/zooms/etc…

Ill check out camtasia

Sketchup does not offer a secondary, independent viewport so this won’t work out of the box. Only thing you could do is to use a renderer such as Enscape as secondary viewport, disable camera sync and try recording that.

Camtasia is a screen capture application so it’ll record your modeling from your point of view.

If you want to do something that looks like a building is going up from ground up, you could that sort of thing with tags, section planes and scenes and then export an animation.

Soo dissapointing! I was hoping for some nice 3D modeling action timelapse. I’m not trying to animate a building going together, more so, a clean video of workflow that I splice together in premiere. I find that when I am modeling I am moving so fast that its ugly to watch as a spectator.

I almost need a secondary viewport to be able to record that, like they have in maya.

Maybe one day

hello, you could dig into this plugin : SketchUp Plugins | PluginStore | SketchUcation

the problem is that it’s going to follow the change of views you are going to do, but there would be a workaround :
do your modeling, undo everything (ctrl+z or alt+backspace) and redo again (ctrl+y), it will rebuild the visual history in the plugin, without changing the point of view. You can then export as a gif.

the only problem is that you’ll be limited by the max undo which is set as 100 I believe. but hey, you can bring several gif together :wink:

If you are hoping to use it as a teaching aid, you might just need to slow down a bit. The screen capture stuff I do with Camtasia is for instruction and it works well for me. I see these videos on You Tube that are titled as tutorials but they turn out to be speed modeling and at least for new users, teach nothing. Not worth the time spent watching them.

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Not so much a teaching aid as choreographed camera shots for a larger video. The ultimate goal would be to setup a camera angle similar to a timelapse camera that is placed on a construction site and have them be built in tandem to show the difference between a modeling workflow and the actual building workflow.

Obviously some creative hurdles but to have that in my tool belt to work with as far as new points of view would be very useful in a creative process.

It would be an interesting option, indeed. I don’t believe there is currently any way to do that, though.

Definitely checking this out. Thanks Paul!

Thanks Dave,

As always super attentive to the forums! I love your feedback.

Thank you very much.

Best of luck.

you’re welcome ! there’s also a pause/ resume recording function in the visual history plugin, that would allow you to get back to your desired point of view, with a saved scene for example, after a modification. If you set up a shortcut to it through preferences, it could do the job

Ah, it almost works! For whatever reason i get a long error when trying to export a gif.

oh :frowning: it works fine here but I don’t have the opportunity to test on macOS, sorry

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Take a look at Licecap . It’s a screen capture app that you can size the “capture frame” so it only will record the SU view. Been testing it a few days learning to create .gif’s and it works fine on my iMac.
If you want the same camera view throughout the final video just set a scene in SU of the view desired. I think trying to model objects while restricted to one view might be pretty difficult ?
You mentioned the “jerky” nature of .gif’s you see posted, I think thats just a result of setting a lower frame rate so file size is reasonable for posting on websites. You can set frames per second to what you desire. Higher frame rate smoother look but huge file size.

The jerky movement I’m referring to is from me rotating the camera while I’m modeling. What I’m trying to find is a plugin that would either allow me to:
A. Setup a separate camera that is recording from a stationery angle that is separate from my camera
or
B. Split my viewport to that I can screen record a stationery scene while I model in the other viewport.

The ultimate goal for the recording would be similar to this youtube video of a construction timelapse:

I’m not (yet) familiar with Ruby, but maybe it’s possible to write a plugin that exports images in the background at constant time intervals with a fixed camera position without having to change the modeling view?
@eneroth3, @thomthom