Camera paths

Gaia Sky includes a feature to record and play back camera paths. This comes in handy if we want to showcase a certain itinerary through a dataset, for example.

Recording a camera path — The system will capture the camera state at every frame and save it into a .gsc (for Gaia Sky camera) file. We can start a recording by clicking on the icon in the camera pane of the control panel. Once the recording mode is active, the icon will turn red . Click on it again in order to stop recording and save the camera file to disk with an auto-generated file name (default location is $GS_DATA/camera (see the folders section in the Gaia Sky documentation).

Playing a camera path — In order to playback a previously recorded .gsc camera file, click on the icon and select the desired camera path. The recording will start immediately.

Tip

Mind the FPS! The camera recording system stores the position of the camera for every frame! It is important that recording and playback are done with the same (stable) frame rate. To set the target recording frame rate, edit the “Target FPS” field in the camcorder settings of the preferences window. That will make sure the camera path is using the right frame rate. In order to play back the camera file at the right frame rate, we can edit the “Maximum frame rate” input in the graphics settings of the preferences window.

Location of the controls of the camcorder in Gaia Sky

Docs

See the camera paths section in the user manual.

Keyframe system

The camera path system offers an additional way to define camera paths based on keyframes. Essentially, the user defines the position and orientation of the camera at certain times and the system generates the camera path from these definitions. Gaia Sky incorporates a whole keyframe definition system which is outside the scope of this tutorial.

As a very short preview, in order to bring up the keyframes window to start defining a camera path, click on the icon .

Docs

See the keyframes system section in the user manual.