Animate your SketchUp models

In the past five years since Google purchased SketchUp (and then made it free), we’ve seen it receive a ton of improvements. Last fall saw the release of SketchUp 8, which added a bunch of great new features, and last month they released another update that provided SpaceNavigator support and a very helpful bug fix.

Despite all of that, there is still one feature missing that users are wanting — animation. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to animate your models from within SketchUp? Thanks to developer MorisDov and his “Proper Animation” plugin, now you can!

Check out the video below for a brief sample:

The plugin works by allowing you to create various positions for your model, and then those model moves to those various positions, creating the animation. It’s a very useful plugin, and I’m sure many SketchUp modelers will be thankful to MorisDov for creating it.

To get started, head over to his site, read this SketchUcation thread, or head over to the Google SketchUp Blog for a nice walk-through.

Have you tried this plug-in yet? What do you think of it?

Google Docs Capabilities

Assemble a team of talented artists, give them Google’s cloud-based presentation app and then marvel at their results. This is definitely not your father’s PowerPoint presentation, with 450 pages crammed into the quickest 89 seconds we’ve ever seen.

Created by three artists who call themselves Tu+, Namroc, and Metcalf, it took a mere three days for these three far-flung virtuosos to perform some serious kung fu on 450 pages. And they didn’t use any trickery such as 3D animation applications at all. Just Google Docs.

They put the animation together for Google Demo Slam, a Google website where each week, two teams are invited to compete against each other using Google technology in unexpected ways. Each demo must be completed in less than two minutes. The competition started on October 20, 2010 and continues until January 30, 2011.
The new heroes of telecommuters everywhere, these guys created all this magic from three separate locations, too. Who knew Google Docs could be so powerful?

Hurricane Visualization using KML

In today’s guest blog post, Greg Gould of Geodesic Development) talks about how he created a unique Google Earth Hurricane Visualization using a custom .NET application to turn NOAA storm track data into a visually exciting KML animation of the 2010 hurricane season.

Geodesic Development was formed after several years of nights and weekends working on code and custom applications specifically designed to generate KML for Google Earth visualizations. Fascinated with the potential for developing new presentations in the 3D world of Google Earth, I’m focused on the “non-traditional” areas and visualizations which aren’t seen often or at all in Google Earth, especially in the main stream media. I hope that our visualizations will affect people’s perceptions of what’s possible in Google Earth.

I decided to create a Google Earth hurricane visualization to test ideas and explore the creative possibilities of animating ground overlays in ways I had not seen before in Google Earth. Hurricane data is readily available in KML from many different sources, but the static track lines and colored icons don’t present the storms in a visually exciting or dynamic way. I thought it was a perfect opportunity to develop an application to take seemingly unexciting data and highlight some new possibilities for presenting it with Google Earth.

The application I developed uses a custom .NET class library to handle the calculations, data processing, and KML text generation for each storm track, which was obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center website. Each storm data file is processed and exported to its own KML file and combined to visualize the entire season. It’s really a cool way to see how the storms developed and the track each one took for one of the busiest seasons on record.

Currently, NOAA provides storm track data in several formats, i.e. Shapefiles, XML, and DBF. For this application the DBF data is manually downloaded as a separate file which contains all the feature information needed to create the KML animation. This file is processed locally as a simple database table with known storm data for each track point, e.g. Name, Dates, Intensity, Category, and Position. These data points will determine which overlay to use and how it gets displayed.

Because this data inherently contains varied amounts of time (from 3 hours to as many as 72) and distance between track points, I had to control the display and transitions of the overlays with a series of loops which interpolate position, heading and rotation to fill in points between each segment of track data. This was an important step for creating a smoother animation and seamless overlay changes. I then use a pre-defined set of overlays, size settings, spin rates, and track icons to create a consistent look and feel for the whole presentation when animating the different layers and files together.

There were definitely some issues with creating a complex visualization like this, having it run smoothly, and all without overwhelming the cache in Google Earth. It took several iterations to find a good compromise between smooth animation and too many overlays (since elements don’t contain the Track element). I think the bigger challenge was to coordinate the overlays, transitions, and track icons with the frequently changing storm data, and get them all to play nice together.

I learned a lot from this project and I think it demonstrates some new possibilities for interesting visualizations that are not typically seen in Google Earth. I hope you like this one, it was fun doing it and hopefully we’ll have some more to show off soon.