[valerostudio]

Is it possible to export a SketchUp animation using Maxwell Suite in SketchUp?

[JDHill]

Are you referring to the animation that SketchUp does when switching between Scenes?

[valerostudio]

Yes, having the tweened animation setup by SU scenes render with Maxwell.

[JDHill]

No, there is currently no automatic way to do that. Some people use a 3rd-party plugin that writes a lot of Scenes, and since the plugin exports a camera for each one, it's relatively trivial to take the resulting MXS and render them all out using a script in Maxwell Render.

[Delineator]

I was wondering if anyone had any luck with this?

I saw JD's script and have fiddled around with SU animate, but I can't seem to get the two to gel quite yet.

I'm no scripting wiz, but one of the issues I'm getting from this script is a debug error saying "setActiveCamera is not defined"

edit: nevermind, I found a follow up here

[JDHill]

The Maxwell scripting API changed a bit, affecting this script -- see here.

[Delineator]

Yup, that works right now (but only for a single computer). I'm toying with a way to net-render (or progressive render) those scenes.

OR perhaps there is a way to mass export scenes as individual MXS files? Then you could batch render the animation, like 3ds Max

[JDHill]

I would think you could modify that same script to save MXS files for each camera, rather than rendering it. If you tried to script it from the plugin, you would have to go through the whole MXS-export routine for every Scene.

[Half Life]

If you could save each camera as an MXS file could that be used to enable motion blur?

Best,
Jason.

[JDHill]

Doing so would not somehow automatically introduce motion blur -- for that, the camera needs to be written (remember that all other factors aside, rendering always takes place within the context of a single MXS file) with two or more physical positions; the engine then interpolates between those to produce blur. The implication, then, would be that you would need to go through all the cameras, record their positions in a list, then go through the list again, where for each camera, you write an MXS which has a camera built using the position of that camera, and the positions of cameras (depending on where and how long the blur is supposed to be) preceding and following it. I'm not sure whether you can do this with a script or not, but you could do it with python.

[Delineator]

I personally don't understand the obsession with doing motion blur with your beauty pass in Maxwell. It may look slightly better than doing it post production via after effects (with or without a motion vector channel), but it really locks you down and gives you no control over the blur in post production.

I really need to learn scripting, I'd love to learn how to export individual MXS scenes for each camera (I think this could be the best solution in combination with SU animate for rendering out animations)