Flythrough

A flythrough is a camera flight through your scene that is also a timeline. The camera follows a smooth path through the nodes you set, at the speed you choose, pausing where you ask it to. Events along the timeline switch layers on and off, fade them in and out, run any command, or show an information note as a slide in front of the camera. A flythrough can be played live, used to drive a presentation one step at a time, or recorded to a video file.

Flythroughs are saved with the project. Open the Flythrough flyout from the tools menu on the right edge of the window to add a flythrough, or to play, pause and stop those you have.

Creating a flythrough

Choose Add flythrough... in the flyout. The editor opens, and while it is open the flight path is drawn in the scene as a ribbon, with a small camera at each node.

To build the path, fly the view to where the camera should be and press Add node from view. Each node records the camera's position and the direction it looks. Keep moving the view and adding nodes; the path is a smooth curve through all of them and the timeline grows as you go. The segment to a new node takes the speed of the one before it, so a path added at a steady pace plays at a steady pace.

A node's camera can be changed later in three ways:

• Fly the view to the node with the button on its row (Fly the view to this node), adjust the view with the mouse, then press the row's Set this node's camera from the current view button.
• Tick Edit nodes in view and drag the node in the scene. The gizmo's arrows move the camera along the world axes and its centre square drags it in the view plane. The three rings turn the camera: the blue ring about the vertical (yaw), the red ring about the camera's right axis (pitch) and the green ring about its line of sight (roll). Hold Shift while turning to snap to five degree steps. Press Escape to abandon a drag.
• Tick Insert on path and click the drawn path where a new node should go. The new node sits exactly on the existing curve, so the shape of the flight does not change until you move it.

Nodes can be removed with the trash button on their row, and reordered from the row's right click menu.

Path smoothing in the Display section blends between straight lines through the nodes (0) and a fully smooth curve (1). Show path and Show cameras turn the ribbon and the node cameras on and off. The path passes through every node at any setting.

Nodes and speed

The node table shows, for each node, when the camera arrives there, how long the segment leaving it takes, the speed over that segment, how long the camera dwells at the node, and how the segment accelerates.

• Segment s and Speed m/s are two views of the same thing: change either and the other follows. The speed is measured along the curve, in the units of your project, usually metres.
• Dwell s holds the camera still at the node for that long. Use a dwell while a slide shows or to let the audience take a view in.
• Easing shapes the acceleration over the segment. Linear is constant speed. Ease in starts slowly, Ease out slows to a stop, and Ease in-out does both. Auto chooses for you: the camera eases away from any node where it was at rest (the first node, a dwell or a wait) and eases into any node where it will stop, and runs at constant speed through nodes it passes straight through.
• Wait holds the camera at the node until you press a key, when present mode is on. See Presenting.

To set one speed over several segments, select the rows (click, Ctrl+click and Shift+click) and use Set for segments. With one row selected the speed applies to the segment leaving that node; with none it applies to the whole flight. The arrow buttons beside Total 5% stretch or shrink the whole timeline, dwells included.

The timeline

The strip above the node table draws the timeline: segments coloured by their easing, dwells as darker blocks, nodes as diamonds and events as dots on the lane below. The red line is the playhead.

• Click or drag anywhere on the strip to move the playhead and show that view. Events fire as the playhead crosses them.
• Drag a node diamond left or right to change the duration of the segment arriving at it. Hold Alt while dragging to change the node's dwell instead.
• Roll the mouse wheel over the strip to zoom in and out about the pointer, and drag with the middle button to pan. Fit shows the whole flight.

Playing

The transport buttons play, pause and stop the flythrough; the slider beside them scrubs through it. The Loop setting is Once, Repeat or Forward-Backward.

While a flythrough plays, dragging the view with the mouse pauses it and hands the camera back to you; press Play again to carry on from the path. Space pauses and resumes, Home and End jump to either end, and Escape stops.

When playback stops, anything the events changed (layer and note visibility and transparency) is put back the way it was, unless Restore layers on stop is unticked.

Events

An event is something that happens on the timeline besides the camera moving. Events are anchored to a node: each one fires a set number of seconds after the camera arrives at its node, so they stay in place when you change the speed of an earlier segment.

Press Add event... to add one. The kinds are:

• Visibility: show or hide a layer, a visualisation, a group or an information note (a world panel or a fixed screen callout), at once or faded in or out over a number of seconds.
• Alpha: change the transparency of a layer, visualisation, group or information note to a value, at once or ramped over a number of seconds. A note's visibility and transparency change only while the flythrough plays; they are not saved with the note.
• Command: run any command the application offers, with its Parameters (JSON) typed in. These are the same commands the Assistant can run. An invalid entry is reported in the log.
• Video: play, pause, stop or restart the video an information note links, on its panel and on any slide of it. Stop puts the video back to the start of its clip; restart plays it from there. For a video that should start only when the timeline says so, untick Play when shown in the note.
• Slide: show an information note in front of the camera. The note fades in, holds, and fades out over the times you give. It is placed a set distance ahead of the camera, or half the camera's focus distance when the distance is 0, and follows the camera unless you untick Follow the camera. A note that is otherwise hidden makes the best slide, since it then appears only when the timeline says so. Ticking Hold the camera at the node for the slide sets the node's dwell to the slide's length so the camera stands still while it shows.

Events fire whenever the playhead crosses them, whether the flythrough is playing or you are dragging the playhead along the timeline or the slider. Fades and slides show the point the playhead has reached, so you can scrub through a fade to judge it. Playing or dragging the timeline backwards takes events back as well: a fade out becomes a fade in, a slide fades back out, and a command that can be undone is undone.

The events table lists every event in time order. The play button on a row shows the scene as it is just after that event.

Presenting

Tick Present mode in the Flythrough flyout (Present in the editor), and tick Wait on a node: the camera stops there, holds whatever slide is showing, and waits for you. Events on a waiting node still play while it holds: a fade, a slide or a video started on arrival (offset 0) runs through while the camera waits, and anything already in progress finishes. Without present mode the Wait ticks are ignored and the flight runs straight through, so the same flythrough can be presented step by step or played as a whole. The setting is remembered between sessions. Press Page Down or the right arrow to continue, or Page Up or the left arrow to play back to the previous waiting node. A presentation clicker that sends Page Up and Page Down works as it would with a slide show. The forward and back buttons in the editor's transport row do the same.

A flythrough built this way can be played from the flyout while you talk: each key press moves to the next view, running any fades and slides on the way.

Recording video

Press Record video... in the editor to write the flythrough to a file (Professional edition). Pick a Format, a Frame rate, the Quality where the format has one, and the Output file:

• H.264 compatible (MP4), the default, plays everywhere, including PowerPoint and phones. It uses 4:2:0 colour, so the finest coloured edges soften a little.
• FFV1 lossless (MKV) keeps every pixel exactly as rendered. Use it as a master to edit from: the files are very large and at full-screen size will not play smoothly or seek quickly. Record H.264 to watch or share.
• ProRes 4444 (MOV) is visually lossless and suits editing, and Keynote or PowerPoint, on a Mac.
• VP9 lossless (WebM) and VP9 high quality (WebM) are smaller and play in web browsers.
• PNG frame sequence writes one lossless image per frame for encoding with another tool.

The dialog offers the choices you last recorded with: the format, frame rate, quality and the options below. It also suggests the folder you last recorded to in this project, otherwise the project's own folder, with the file named after the flythrough.

The video is recorded at the size of the window, so size the window before you start. The interface is hidden while recording unless you untick Hide the interface while recording. With Wait for the terrain to load before each frame ticked, each frame is captured only once the terrain and imagery in view have finished loading, so even a fast flight shows no half-loaded tiles; the recording then takes as long as the loading needs rather than the flight's own duration. Nodes that wait for a key are played straight through. Press Escape to cancel a recording; the partial file is removed.

When a note links a video with sound, the recording includes the sound of the panel videos that play during the flight. The sound is heard as it would be from the camera, panned and quieter with distance, and stays in time with the pictures. Untick Record the sound of panel videos for a silent recording. A PNG frame sequence gets its sound as a WAV file of the same name beside the frames. The master Video volume (%) and Mute videos in Configure > User Interface apply to the recording too, as do a panel's mute and volume controls.

Keys