SketchUcation Community member “Speaker” posted an excellent animation of Luxo in the classic Pixar Animation studios logo remade in SketchUp, animated with Sketchy Physics and finally rendered with Podium.

“I began this by finding a great high poly model of Luxo in the warehouse which I then remodelled and grouped so it was then about 8 times smaller in size and with many adjustments to allow me to move and rotate different parts of the model. After that I inserted an omni inside the bulb with some extra geometry to lead the light and added some transparency to the bulb itself (needed some time to figure out how to make this work because at different parts of the animation the transparency had to change, the reason is that at a certain angle of view the light will break from a different side of the face).

Next I made Luxo fully functional in SU physics and saved him at different positions that served as templates. Then I put them on a path that was divided in segments to match the desired fps rate and rotated Luxo’s head and the base plate for each copy (100 Mb file in the end ). The process was kind of similar for all the animation.

Brought the models in the “stage” with 8 omnis for a softer shadow and rendered them one by one. There were more than 250 frames in the end with an average rendering time of 3 minutes, with optimal presets and 1216 x 676 resolution.
The final step was to put all the frames in Sony Vegas studio and synchronise them with the audio track and add the signature” says “Speaker” (as if it were that simple and easy).

Read more (and see higher resolution images and video) in the forum topic.