[Bf-committers] Re: Screen dump - OpenGL content

Rui Campos rcampos at fusemail.com
Tue Sep 12 12:47:51 CEST 2006


Hi all,

My current knowledge only allows me to do this type of recording.

I'm already able to record most of the keys / mouse events on a stack, but
my problem is playing them back, moving the mouse and pressing the keys
again, if I could do this I would write a simple Python API and script for
it.
The problem is that I didn't find a nice way to move the mouse to a given
location and issue keyboard commands. If anyone can help me I rather do
this instead.

-- Rui --

----------------------------------------------------
> Message: 5
> Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 23:57:47 -0600
> From: jonathan ferguson <jdpf at edumetrics.org>
> Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Screen dump - OpenGL content
>
> 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
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:24:20 +0200
> From: Emanuel Greisen <blender at emanuelgreisen.dk>
> Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Screen dump - OpenGL content
>
>> Cool idea!
>
> Oh yeah !, this would most likely result in a boom in tutorial-videos
> (which also serves as good inspiration for the late hours...)
>
>> 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.
>>
> And even better, if you want to, you can replay your "history" at 25fps
> taking screendumps to files afterwards. This would not run in real-time,
> but who cares, the images will reflect real-time usage (there will be no
> mouse-leaps, huge jumps when rotating geometry, etc. etc).
>
> And the most important of all the things this could be used for.....
> MACROS !!!! Recording of macros is what makes text-editing valuable
> (when editing data represented by text that is). If it was possible to
> record macros edit them and then execute them.... Man that would be nice.
>
> There is already a project that is moving towards this kind of feature
> (as I can see):
>
> http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/CommandLine
>
> Some more design-work needs to be done, I think to make the feature
> usefull for the things mentioned here:
>
> - Movie-recording
> - Action History
> - Recording of Macros
> - Saving in-game sequences of the "world"
> - UI-testing
> - Editable Undo/Redo stack
>
> Ideally this would be integrated into the fileformat, so that you could
> record a "macro"/"action sequence"/"history" or what ever it should be
> called. Then "save" it as an object in your scene, making it possible to
> import these "sequences" from other blender-files, make scene-dependent
> sequences and so on. This would lead to the smaller download size for
> demoes unless the geometry, material, etc. is HUGE.
>
> There is a lot of things that needs to be worked out, but I for one
> thinks that this feature some form would greatly improve the
> posibilities in blender.
>
> ./Emanuel


More information about the Bf-committers mailing list