SIMPLE WALK-AROUND METHOD
1. Click the "Front" view
2. Create an Animation Scene
3. Repeat Steps 1 & 2 for the right side, back, and left side
You'll now have 4 camera positions around your object and can animate between them as if walking around your object (or as if spinning your object on a turntable).
Go to File>Export>Animation and you can tell it how many frames per second and how big to render the images. You can either export it as a Quicktime video or as individual image files (keep in mind that is one image for each frame). At a bare minimum you only need the four views, but it makes for a very choppy rotation. The preset duration is 2 seconds from one camera to another so the lowest setting of 5 fps will add 9 frames between each of the ones you've created (the 1st frame is the scene you created for a total of 10 frames for each segment).
You can then take the images into VR software - I have VRworx Toolbox - and create an Object QTVR mov file that is truly interactive, rather than just a video. The images can also be used in other programs that can make VR files. If you want to reduce file size you can simply not use all the tween animation frames - just grab one out of the middle or a couple near the middle (depending on how smooth you want the transition from one view to another). I'd recommend not going fewer than 8 views (front, left side, back, right side, and one 3/4 view between each straight on view).
The problems with this method are, while it may be easy to do, it is limited to the default views and the animation path won't export to Kerkythea correctly and even trying to use the scenes with the Walkthrough Animation dialog doesn't work right (not sure why but the camera "swims" all over the place until it gets to the next scene) so you're stuck with the low quality "cartoon" images that Google SketchUp creates.
CAMERAS ON A CIRCLE
What we need is the ability to put our camera positions on a circle and precisely control the point at which each camera is focused. The video I found below is a good start!
In the video he wants an "ant eye" view of the car, so his cameras are positioned along the floor and looking upwards to a single point. He even raises the car model and updates his scenes at the end to make it more dramatic. In my case I have smaller objects like a candy box, which make more sense if you look downward at them. I grabbed my circle and raised it slightly above the height of my model then positioned each camera looking downward to the center.
However, as I said the images look sort of like cartoons. I want nice renders! The simple method I talked about doesn't export the animation to Kerkythea properly, but this precision method thankfully does. It takes a little more work, of course. . .
PHOTO RENDERING IN KERKYTHEA
1. First, I need to modify the method outlined in the video slightly. Instead of moving my model to a new layer I need to keep it on the default layer (the one you can't delete). Why? If I don't my model wouldn't export. So I create my circle and central post on the secondary layer. Other than that I do what the video says up to the point of exporting the animation.
2. Instead of creating a Quicktime movie I go to Kerkythea Exporter > Export Model and open it up in Kerkythea. I can close SketchUp at this point.
3. In Kerkythea I go to Tools > Walkthrough Animation and it pops up a dialog box. Enter a name like "VR" in the first box.
4. In the Walkthrough Animation dialog click the "Add Node" button. In the drop-down list select the first scene.
5. Continue clicking "Add Node" and selecting the next scene in the sequence around your object.
6. Under "Duration" I enter a one. What?! Yep. You want a duration of 1 seconds for this.
7. Under "Rate" enter an 7. Click "OK"
8. Select the animation "camera" in the left pane of Kerkythea.
9. Go to the Render button, a dialog will pop up. It should already have the Walkthrough Animation name in the first box because it was selected in the left-hand pane. Decide how big and nice you want it to look and what rendering method to use. Click "OK"
10. It will open a Save dialog. Enter a file name. This will be appended with the frame numbers as each one is created. Click "SAVE" and sit back. This could take a while if you used a higher resolution setting.
Ok, to explain what I'm doing here I told it to make 8 frames (the current view + 7 frames) and run a total of 1 second (8 fps), which means I will get a sum total of just EIGHT fully rendered images. If I was rendering smaller resolution images I could enter something bigger like 16 or 24 for smoother rotation. If I was rendering these for video, though, I'd need a helluva lot more frames (if I left it at the default settings of 10 seconds @ 24 fps = 240 images).
Now I take my 8 views and import them into VR software to create an Object VR or I can put them in a web page and use a CSS Image Map to create a roll-over animation effect (as someone drags a mouse across the image it will swap out the views creating the illusion of a 3D object rotation). This way I can give viewers a nice, crisp, high quality photo render of the package design while only having to load 8 images.
End note: If you're familiar with Google SketchUp and Kerkythea you may have wondered why I didn't just export the animation path from SU to KT? Well, it appears that the Kerkythea exporter will only "see" objects on the default Layer 1 in SketchUp. So when I attempt to export my animation path it fails because, so far as the exporter is concerned, there isn't one. It doesn't matter anyway since it's so easy to recreate the animation path in Kerkythea with the Walkthrough Animation dialog. Now, if I had a really complex animation path (for example one created with the Bezier curve and Flightpath plugins) I'd probably want to move my animation path to the first layer so I could export it. But for something as simple as a circular orbit around an object why bother?
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