Animating Dynamic Components in Sketchup

Being able to open doors and windows interactively inside your Sketchup model can give you to get a better understanding of sightlines between internal rooms while delivering that extra “wow factor” to a presentation. In this tip I show you how to animate objects like these in your 3d model with a simple click of a button by using embedded commands inside dynamic components. Dynamic components can be used to assign pre-programmed commands and operations to an object, allowing it to change within a set of customisable rules. You can add dynamic properties to any components that you make and in this video I look at the ANIMATE command that works when inserted as an onClick behaviour. In the video I go through programming a basic swing and sliding door and then use the interact tool to execute the functions. There is a little bit of pseudo coding involved which can turn people off, but this example is very basic and the steps I go through here can be followed by anyone. It should be noted also that there are a couple of bugs in the dynamic component plugin which can be a bit of a nuisance and I point these out in the video. The onClick commands that I use are: ANIMATE(“RotZ”,0,90) - Rotates our object around its origin axis by 90 degrees and then returns it back to the 0 degrees state with a subsequent click. ANIMATE(“X”,0,-86) - Moves our object from its origin axis minus 86 centimetres along the X axis and then returns it back to its previous state with a subsequent click. You can also create multiple command combinations, ie. rotate and move together, by separating each command with a semi-colon (;) inside the dialog box. More advanced dynamic component movement can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40jHglQix7o  Learn more hints and tips at: sketchuptraining.com.au