Recording and playing camera paths

Gaia Sky offers the possibility to record camera paths out of the box in real time and later play them. These camera paths go to a text file in the temp folder of your system.

Camera path file format

The format of the file is pretty straightforward. It consists of a csv file with white spaces as delimiters, each row containing the state of the camera and the time. The state of the camera consists of 9 double-precision floating point numbers, 3 for the position and 3 for the direction vector and 3 for the up vector.

The reference system used is explained in the Internal reference system section. The units are .

The format of each row is as follows:

• long - Time as defined by the getTime() function of java.util.Date (here).

• double x3 - Position of the camera.

• double x3 - Direction vector of the camera.

• double x3 - Up vector of the camera.

Recording camera paths

In order to start recording the camera path, click on the REC button next to the Camera section title in the GUI Controls window. The REC button will turn red , which indicates the camera is being recorded.

In order to stop the recording and write the file, click again on the red REC button. The button will turn grey and a notification will pop up indicating the location of the camera file. Camera files are by default saved in the $HOME/.gaiasky/camera directory.

Playing camera paths

In order to play a camera file, click on the PLAY icon next to the REC icon. This will prompt a list of available camera files in the $HOME/.gaiasky/camera folder.

You can also combine the camera file playback with the frame output system to save each frame to a JPEG image during playback. To do so, enable the Activate frame output automatically checkbox in the preferences dialog as described in the Camera recording section.