Flight Tours and Movies

Introduction

Flight tours are great for giving an overview of a graphic scene.

A flight tour consists of several camera positions that Geocap will fly through, changing the view angle according to the different camera positions. Flight tours can be executed directly from the project or as part of a workflow. They can also be exported to different movie formats.



In this section:

Creating camera positions

Camera positions can be added to any Generic folder in your project. It is often most convenient to create a new folder and rename it Cameras Read more about creating folders. You should also have the appropriate datasets displayed.

Move the graphical view in to the position you want to start the flight tour in and right-click the camera folder. Select New > Camera Position. The camera position will automatically be named camera1. Continue to the next camera position and repeat the process until you have reached the end of your flight tour. The camera positions will have been named sequentially by numbers.

Running a flight tour

Before you start running a flight tour make sure you have displayed all the datasets you want to display. Start the flight tour by executing the Flight Tour command which you will find under Visualization in the Toolbox. The Flight Controller menu will pop up and the flight tour will start.


Flight Controller menu

The flight controller menu lets you change the direction of the flight tour, pause, play and stop it, increase and decrease the speed and run the tour in loop. You can pre-define some of these options in the Flight Tour command menu.

Creating a movie

At the moment there is no command for exporting a flight tour to a movie format. This means you will need to run the process with shell commands. However, it is a very simple process.

  1. Make sure you have displayed all the datasets you want to display during the flight tour.
  2. Head over to the shell in the Toolbox and type in:

    Shell
    movie filename c:/yourpath/yourfilename.avi
    movie recfly on
    
  3. Start the flight tour.
  4. When the flight tour has finished, type:

    Shell
    movie recfly off
    

The .avi file will now be present at the selected path.

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