[Bf-committers] Screen dump - OpenGL content

[jonathan ferguson]

On Sep 11, 2006, at 10:43 AM, Rui Campos wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm researching a bit on screen capture and Blender, hoping to help on
> creating a video recording facility into Blender.
>
> The hardest thing is that Blender is full OpenGL and grabbing an  
> OpenGL
> screen isn't that easy, specially if we want to do a 25fps video  
> out of
> it.

Cool idea!

But...why capture bit-mapped *video* at all? I would assume that  
users interested in learning how to use blender would actually have  
blender available to play with. Why not *record the actions of the  
user straight off* and skip the whole mess of video encoding/ 
decoding, incompatible codecs, etc? Could the blender timeline/ 
animation/ and sound systems help here somehow?

What about the idea of building a "filmstrip" that records the actual  
user's actions--- not images of actions, but the *actual actions*  
themselves? Learners could then interrupt, and rewind the "action  
stack"  (much like an undo stack...) to see what happened, or how to  
do it themselves. I imagine that this would also have the added bonus  
of paving the way to "filmstrips" in the game engine--- where users  
could save a "movie" of their game play. Also, (being imaginative),  
such an action recording could evolve into a history list--- much the  
way that users can scrub through their history of changes in  
Photoshop/Illustrator... Oh, and (being more imaginative) don't  
forget that this might be handy for UI testing too.

Such a list would give valuable feedback to blender novices (and more  
experienced users alike). (Huh? What did i just do?).

Presumably, this method would make training filmstrip download sizes  
much much smaller--- and that's a win for everyone i think.

Of course, it would be up to the individual watching the filmstrip to  
satisfy the blender dependencies for their platforms: yafray, python  
scripts, etc... (packed .blend files might be handy here...) :D

anyway.

just an "i'm in waay over my head" thought.

have a nice day.yad
jdpf