Animation in Sketchup

Sketchup, itself, supports only camera animation, using its notion of a scene It does not support object animation But there are ways of achieving object animation in Sketchup

Two ways of achieving object animation in Sketchup Manually –using hidden layers Programmatically –using the Ruby programming language

Manual object animation in Sketchup Consider this document, containing a cylinder and a box Suppose we want to create an animation in which the box moves from its position below to...

Manual object animation in Sketchup Consider this document, containing a cylinder and a box Suppose we want to create an animation in which the box moves from its position below to... the position shown below

Manual object animation in Sketchup Suppose we want the movement to happen in, say, 8/25 of a second That is, at 25 fps, in 8 frames We will need the first frame to look like the top view The 8th frame must look like the bottom view Each frame will be visible for 0.04 second and there will be 0 seconds transition time between frames

Manual object animation in Sketchup Consider this document, containing a cylinder and a box Suppose we want to create an animation in which the box moves from its position below to... the position shown below

Manual object animation in Sketchup First, we make 8 copies of the box, each in a different position

Manual object animation in Sketchup Then we open the Layers window and...

Manual object animation in Sketchup... we make 8 layers (extra to the default layer, Layer 0) we place one copy of the box in each of these layers

Manual object animation in Sketchup Then we open the Scenes window

Manual object animation in Sketchup Initially, all layers are visible in the document at the same time

Manual object animation in Sketchup Then, we create Scene 1, in which just Layer 0 and Layer 1 are visible

Manual object animation in Sketchup Then, we create Scene 2, in which just Layer 0 and Layer 2 are visible

Manual object animation in Sketchup Then, we create Scene 3, in which just Layer 0 and Layer 3 are visible

Manual object animation in Sketchup And so on until... we have created Scene 8, in which just Layer 0 and Layer 8 are visible At this stage, we have all the scenes we need for the animation All we need do now is set the transition time and scene delay and export the animation as a movie

Manual object animation in Sketchup Below, the Sketchup document is being saved; it is available at

Exercise Tackle Exercise 33