Animation - visible layers

[Haloid]

Hi, I need help with a little something.

I did set up scenes with camera flights in Twilight Render 2 Hobby in Sketchup Pro 2021.

Scene 1 where you see a sphere, closeup.
Scene 2, where a second sphere is made visible by switching on its tag. PoV slowly starts focusing sphere2

Now when I play the two scenes in Sketchup, this happens:
- Scene 1, see sphere1
- Scene 2, sphere2 becomes visible (off-screen), camera goes to sphere2

But when I render the animation in Twilight, instead this happens
- Scene 1, see sphere1
- Scene 2, camera goes to the place of sphere2
- in the last frame of Scene 2, sphere2 just pops into existence

Did I do something wrong with the tags? Is there an option in Twilight that controls the visibility tag behavoir? I just wasted a whole night of rendering, because Twilight visibility behaves different than Sketchup visibility.

[Haloid]

So to explain it simple:

Sketchup view updates the tag (layer) visibility at the START of the scene animation
Twilight seems to update the tag visibility at the END of the scene animation

Now do I have to re-plan all my scenes? Or is there an easy solution?

[Chris]

We will look into this. Twilight Render doesn't maintain its own visibility (or anything for that matter) for an object, it just uses what SketchUp says. So there shouldn't be a difference. We will look into what might be going on, but if you can provide a file that reproduces what you are experiencing, that would be helpful.

[Haloid]

if you can provide a file that reproduces what you are experiencing, that would be helpful.

of course.

I can actually watch it while Twilight renders. It moves through the scenes, and the "update" to the tag visibility happens
in the last frame.

If you only use sketchup to animate the scene, the visibility switch happens at the first frame of the scene.

[Haloid]

Or better: The last, and first frame of the scene transition.

[Chris]

Ok. Interesting. SketchUp exposes a method that allows Twilight Render to tell it, "position the animation at 1.4 seconds", or whatever. And SketchUp does that and that is how TWR controls the animation for rendering. But there is a totally different mechanism that SketchUp uses that is just "Play this animation". My guess is that SketchUp acts differently based on those situations, with the result as you described. If that is the case, there may not be anything TWR can do about it. But we will take a look.

BTW, what version of SketchUp are you using?

[Haloid]

Interesting.

I'm looking currently for a workaround. I'll have to plan the scene transitions with that in mind.
Currently working with Sketchup Pro 2021