EVE Probe

I made it look the same by going to the 5th tab on an object and right clicking the location and transformation rows and selecting add keyframe.

However I actually still couldn't get it to work with a from-scratch blend file. I'm currently just modifying the example.blend, which seems to work fine.

http://imgur.com/iTZyyrM

-edit-

Also sad about those gr2 files. Camera motion would make it all a lot nicer.

Odd, even opening the file I uploaded shows a bezier curve. Starting from scratch with bezier still doesn't work.

Another thing I noticed is that all objects have to have at least 2 keyframes, even if you want something to be in one spot.
All objects have to have a material assigned.

I also think the first keyframe has to start at frame 0, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

Also useful is to have the logServer application open.

+1

I have some cool plans for this, but, I'm realising that for really complex scenes I want to set caps on frame rates when rendering, and possibly the ability to set time dilation from the command line. Any word from the devs?

After about 40 hours of work I finally have this 360 video - that is a video which is rendered on a sphere, enabling you to turn the camera in any direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tctGKL5RO_U

It took a pile of code and patience to make this all work, the scenes were rendered 6 times from each primary axis then stiched together using some custom code I wrote (there are commercial packages, but I like writing code). The fields of view all overlap to avoid hard edge effects. The whole process would take a couple of hours to go from the 6 videos to the spherical projection (it would be faster but because of file size it all ran on NFS). Sometimes I had synchronization issues where the frames would line up in space but not in time, and similarly the geometry of some effects would be odd since multiple camera views are being merged. Most of the scenes were generated by parsing the static data file to pull out all the ship DNA for each race and then the code put together a fleet that would flyby the camera. Making the ships do anything else was fraught with problems so that dictated the video content.

I don't want to do this again any time soon, many problems were encountered, workarounds were needed and Eve Probe proved to be severly lacking in features - here's a few comments on things I'd really like to see in a future version of probe.

* I could make the ships shoot at a target, but failed to get them to stop shooting at a target, which meant destroyed spacecraft would continue to receive incoming fire
* Missiles moved way faster than they should, with no way to set their velocity
* Even specifiying a random number seed would not provide repeatable scenes. Laser fire would change from one take to the next
* Using the move_to command made it easy to move objects, but I don't see a way to rotate them without writing an external animation file, that's why most scenes have everything flying in a straight line. I would really like a simple 'rotate_to' command.
(note that the add_behaviour command may have a way to do this, but I didn't see an example)
* I figured out how to map region names to the scenes, but I don't think there's a way to do wormhole scenes
* No ship animations
* Cynoing out was easy, Cynoing ships in required adding the ship, adding the effect, then removing the ship while the effect plays and finally readding the ship. Then cut out the ship in post production to make it look like it wasn't there beforehand.
* The movie dump feature would be cool if I could specify a framerate, but without it I resorted to an external capture program.
* There's one example of adjusting rendering settings, would like to know what other options are available, anti-aliasing would be nice to have.
* window size was restricted by screen resolution, I had to hack around this to get the resolutions I needed.



(And if you have a really cool scene you've created that you'd like to see turned into a 360 video let me know and I'll try it).

I hope so, would love to make some more dynamic looking scenes, with a future version of Probe

Here's a follow up video with some details on how I did all this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiQBOAlbQKQ