Render animation question

[javqui]

Background:
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I'm running twilightRender (paid license) on sketchup 2015 64bit on Windows 7.
I'm using sketchup for simple product CAD rather than typical architecture CAD as many here. Animation is a key factor in my case and that's why I decide to buy the twilightRender (I'm using other rendering solutions that works a lot easier and faster with excellent results, but didn't support scene animation very well).
For easy animation, I'm using a paid version of keyframe animation. It cover most of my animation needs. This plugin generate all scenes with the required layers.

The question (issue) with twilightRender:
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The logical option is to use the "render Animation" tool from twilightRender to render all scenes, but this tool can't render all scenes, it just render some of them.
If I have 300 scenes with a scene transition of 0.04s (25fps ), it should compute the total animation as 12.5 seconds with 300 frames, but twilighter "render animation" tool shows a short duration with less frames (usually less than half of the real ones), so I need to render a portion, delete the scenes, render another portion, delete the scenes, etc. Usually is a manual workflow of 5-6 loops.
I try many other options, scenes, fps and timings, but never got the "real animation" time in the "render animation tool".
If I export the animation using the sketckup tool, it create all images (one per scene) without any issue.

What can I do? I don't want to manually create the scenes, render, delete some, render, delete more, render, and so on. Is a tedious work.
is a bug or there is other way to do that?

Thanks in advance for any comment about this topic.

[Fletch]

Hello Javqui,
Please change your forum status and you will have access to the Twilight Render 2 technical support forum and resources section.
Just go here to UPGRADE FORUM ACCOUNT
Enter your Product ID and your Forum name and hit Upgrade.

Meanwhile, I am trying to understand, as I don't believe we have ever tested a file with 300 scene tabs, please post a screenshot of the animation panel settings you are using.

[Chris]

First, to make sure we are on the same page:
- 300 frames at 0.04s per frame is 12 seconds not 12.5
- When Twilight Render calculates the total elapsed time, the first frame is at 0 seconds, the second frame at 0.04s, etc. So the total time is actually one transition time less than (300 * 0.04), because the first frame is at 0. So what Twilight Render *should* display is 11.96 seconds.

If it isn't showing that, then check that all your frames are included in the animation. I did a quick test with 20 frames and the result 0.76s which is exactly what is expected.

All that said, the end time / elapsed time is actually not that important (in this case, it's not important at all). What you ultimately care about are the number of rendered frames. If you set your End Time to whatever it says the end time is (it should be 11.96s) and set the FrameRate to 25, your Rendered Frames should be 300. If it is, then you shouldn't have any problem rendering the animation, regardless of what the end time is.

Now, it's entirely possible that there is some limitation on scenes. Like Fletch said, I'm not aware of anyone trying this before. However, make sure to check your FrameRate and EndTime, ensure all your scenes are included in the animation, and make sure your transition time is 0.04s. If the Animation Editor is displaying the wrong information after double-checking all that, please post what values it actually is displaying (or a screen shot of the Animation Settings drop down).

[Fletch]

Twilight is rendering still frames and exporting them one by one as it renders. It does not put them together for you in an .avi.

So, essentially, all you need to do is render all the frames, and set the frame rate for the image sequence in your video editor.

Why not make the scene transition "1" second, and the video length "299 seconds" (because the first frame is "0").

Then in your video editor, set frame rate at 25fps for the image sequence. (it's my assumption that the .04 is throwing off something in the calculation)

[javqui]

Thanks for the reply.
The issue is related with the scenes. is not about timing or framing, or about one frame more or less (considering 0). When I said 12.5 seconds (or 12), the tool shows less than 8 seconds (means less than 200 frames)

I found a better and simple example:

Try to render an animation with some scenes (lets say 60 scenes) where only the first have the camera active. You can 't render any frame on "render animation" tool, the total time is 0 seconds, even with 60 scenes active. (doesn't matter the timing, the delays, the transition time, the fps, etc. , the total frames still 0). Activate the camera on all scenes and you get 61 frames available.

Hope this simple example will explain the issue better.
What I really need is to render one image per scene in the animation ( using video formats like avi, mp4, etc, are a very bad idea for post-edition in other platforms because quality loss).

Layers and group/components rotations/translations works well on twilight, probably the issue is about how twilightrender compute the amount frames (it looks at camera transitions, but scenes doesn't have camera transitions).

A temporal solution is just to activate camera on every scene (even if it is in the same position as previous scenes). I have several sketchup files with 60 to 400 scenes. Doing that is a lot of work and break the possibility to edit camera positions easily in just one scene. Hope you can provide a better solution.

thanks in advance.


Edit:
Found that camera position from standard sketchup scenes works as expected. The issue is related with scenes created by Keyframe Animator without a Camera position.

[Chris]

To clarify: when you say "camera active" or "Activate the camera", are you talking about the Camera Location checkbox in SketchUp's animation settings editor, or are you talking about the Include in Animation checkbox?

The Include in Animation checkbox must be checked. Twilight Render uses certain methods available through the SketchUp plugin api to position the animation at a specific point in time along the animation sequence. If a frame is not included in the animation, it is impossible to position the animation at a point that includes that frame. It's just not how it works in SketchUp.

However, if you are talking about the Camera Location checkbox... I am not able to repeat that. That checkbox doesn't seem to have any affect on the animation calculation (though obviously it will just leave your camera in the same place for every frame).

[javqui]

Sorry, I was really busy the last days.

Attached you will find a file with a typical example.
According with "animation editor", the total time is 0.00 seconds, but there are +144 scenes. All of them with the "include in animation" check.
If you try to render, it will render only the first scene, even if the animation time is 6 seconds.
Hope the file will help to find the issue.

A simple option to render each scene individually, without use any calculated time, could be very useful for many other applications and "key animators" plugins.

[Chris]

We will take a look at your file. Thank you for posting it.

The Batch Render Editor is able to render multiple scenes (that's exactly what it is made for). At this time it does not have a "render all" feature but that could be added.

[Chris]

It appears this is a SketchUp problem. Or maybe it's by design, but it seems like a bug to me. It appears that if the Camera Location is turned off it doesn't include it in SketchUp's "slideshow" calculations. However, that doesn't appear to always happen, so there must be something else going on caused by how the scenes were created.

Luckily it can be fixed. Open a ruby console and enter the following (enter after each line):

Code: Select all

pages = Sketchup.active_model.pages
page_array = pages.to_a
page_array.each{ |p| p.use_camera=true }

That will turn the camera location on for each page. And then it should work.