Is there a way to record the 3D Navigator's input?

[vectorhastings]

Is there a program people know of to record the input the 3D Navigator is giving to an application. Kind of like recording mouse movements.

My need for this is to precisely reproduce camera moves in Second Life. We are filming a movie, but for complicated setups and for composite special effects shots, we'll want to use the same camera motion each time after changing scene elements or avatar positions.

"In world" solutions are klunky at best. The 3D Navigator gives the best camera control by far. But there's no way to reproduce its motions, each shot is a different manual filming path.

This kind of reproducibility is like a real-world, computer controlled dolly camera movement and is vital for special effects.

The Second Life client itself doesn't have a way to record the camera movement, only the rendered screen result. Likewise, any other form of screen capture doesn't meet my needs.

Any thoughts, anyone?

[streg]

You could try Advanced menu in second life client. It can be enabled by pressing "ctrl+alt+D"

After that you might be able to record and play back avatar movements through "Advanced->Recorder"

And please post your findings.

Ps. If someone knows what "Logging" does in the recorder menu, id like to know

[vectorhastings]

I've played with that record option on the Advanced menu. As far as I can tell, it records the arrow keys. So if you had a game you were playing, or a race you're running, you could try to record the keystrokes and play them back.

But you can't save your "recorded" file, and the realities of lag make it a dubious feature IMHO.

[DCrosby]

Even if you could record the data and send it to second life, at the same time, then emulate that data over and over again to second life as a fake 3D Mouse device, how are you going to get your actors and environment to stay constant ? Over and over...
Even beyond that it's a flawed idea, I've been working on the Gears Of War 2 commercials for a VFX studio in Hollywood, and getting plates and or renders of things in maya to line up with what's being rendered in a real-time engine is dangerous at best if it works, because the engine just dumps frames as fast as it can, which depends heavily on your hardware, and what you're trying to display. So matching that up over and over, would heavily depend on bandwidth and server load in second life which is something you can't control unless you work for them or have your own second life server.

[vectorhastings]

Your points are all well taken. The environment is frightfully complex.

But I am controlling avatars over and over by programming their animations using the second life scripting languages. It works surprisingly well for such a chatoic, multi-layered environment.

But back to the accuracy in your point: things DO NOT reproduce perfectly from take to take. Not only are their the architectures which make frame rate inconsistent, there are built in measures to make the game "feel" realistic, like those pulsating avatar movements and local weather. All this does make perfect compositing impossible.

But imperfect reproduction and compositing will be good enough in many cases and a vast improvement over what we have now.

And without any means to reproduce a gliding camera path, it's massively time consuming to even work out avatar's eye-lines in relation to the camera. Which I think is why so many machinimists are forced to just plop camera in place when they're trying to film an avatar.