There are many different approaches to producing animations, and the approach you take depends on the tools you have available to you. In terms of rendering, I generally use Vray, though I do have Kerkythea as a backup and for experimentation.
Over the weekend I produced several animations - one using the Proper Animation plugin together with the free, open source rendering software, Kerkythea, and 3 using standard scene transitions inside of SketchUp along with Vray. Additionally, you can just export scene transitions directly from SketchUp and splice them together in a video editing program, which are included in the test animation.
The video below is the tutorial I used, showing the proper settings that worked with my version of Sketchup (8 Pro) and Vray. The most important steps are that you check Global Switches in your Vray options window, "Batch Render," and under Output, check "Animation," as well as designate where Vray will save finished frames to. Under View>Animation>Settings, you should also enable scene transitions, set an appropriate transition time in seconds (the tutorial used 3 seconds, I used 8), and ensure that "Scene Delay" is set to zero. Other tutorials will have you change a host of options, and these may work in certain instances, but not on my computer.
