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Derek McFarland/3 min read

Creating Walkthroughs and Animations in Sketchup: Exploring Visual Styles and Shadows

Animation Workflow

1

Set Up Scenes

View → Animation → Add Scene at each viewpoint along your walkthrough.

2

Choose a Style per Scene

Each scene can save its own style — switch from sketch to photoreal.

3

Set Shadow Settings

Time of day affects mood — early morning vs noon vs golden hour.

4

Export Animation

File → Export → Animation → MP4 with your transition timing.

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This SketchUp tutorial walks through creating walkthroughs and animations in sketchup: exploring visual styles and shadows, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

and now we get to do the fun stuff. We're going to look at Scenes, animations, and creating a walkthrough in SketchUp. But before we go any further, I would like to save this file as a “Save As, ” so go to File > Save As.

Let’s go to our SKP 101 File Downloads folder. Let’s save this file as “community-park-yourinitials, ” then click Save. After that, I will do another Save As and name the file “community-park-animation, ” using a dash between “park” and “animation, ” then click Save. Now we have two saved versions: one for our park and one for our new animation file.

Before we begin to build our animation, let's talk a little bit about visual styles in SketchUp. If we go to Window > Default Tray and check Styles*, it will appear at the bottom of the tray. When we opened the original Architectural Inches template, the Architectural Design style that it's currently using was automatically loaded at the same time as our base units.

By going down this dropdown menu and exploring the various design styles, we can experiment with different artistic looks for our building. These are fun and quick ways to create sketchy, hand-drawn image styles and perspectives of your design.

As you may notice, the closer you zoom in, the more detail you'll see in your model. The farther away you are, the more the model appears like a brush-stroke rendering with general outlines of your design. Feel free to explore the many different styles available.

There are some really nice style presets for building competitions—like “Pencil on Light Brown.” There are so many to choose from.

I could look at these for days, just exploring the various ways this park looks. But for now, let’s go to our Default Styles and click Shaded*. This is our basic design view with a white sky and white background.

We also have the Landscape Architecture Style*, which is another nice option. This one shows a ground plane and a sky.

Let’s use this style for our animation. Let’s open our Shadows Dialog Box and turn shadows on. Go to the Shadows panel and check Shadows*.

Here I see that shadows are casting along the ground. I want to turn that off, so I’ll uncheck On Ground*.

You may have noticed that our trees are not casting any shadows. That’s because the trees are image textures applied to a hidden surface. Since the surface holding the image is hidden, the trees will not cast a shadow.