Very cool! Looking forward to it!
BTW, shouldn't it be X/Z/Y coordinates? 
Hopefully this'll make it easier to define curves and arcs rather than grimacing over Excel trying to work out sine curves and arc-sines and tangents and arc-co-tangents. >_<
Test Subject 42 - lvl 50 Sp/DA Scrapper
Oku No Te - lvl 50 MA/SR Scrapper
Borg Master - lvl 24 Bots/traps MM
Pinnacle
Nyghtfyre - lvl 50 DM/SR Scrapper
Champion
Thanks!
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BTW, shouldn't it be X/Z/Y coordinates?
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If it were still doing that, I would have a broken monitor and bloody knuckles by now. 
The only curve it does so far is circles in the x, y, or z plane. You can do circles around a moving object, though, so you can rez up a puddle, move that in a line, spin around it, and get yourself a nice spiral.
If I had the time there are a TON of moves that could be done. Circles not on a plane is high on my list. Generalizing to elipses might be handy. Oh, and I need to add the ability to face something other than the center point when spinning. Maybe move in zig-zags, or keep a constant relative position to an object. Or.... hmmm.... or maybe I should get this thing out the door THEN start working on more stuff.
Zloth, I love you and would like to adopt foreign-born babies with you.
Seriously, manually doing movement in demos is one of my all-time pet peeves about the whole process. The villains running after the hero in "Your Superpowers and You!" ? I cheated, to an extent, and it was still a pain in the [censored].
I've got a whole thing planned for an upcoming movie that I was frankly scared of having to do. With this, even if the interface is enough to cause me temporary sterility and color-deafness in my left foot, it'll be a snap.
Awesome work, dude. Simply awesome.
After having done a bit of hand-coding animation in POV-RAY and Moray (the former's a raytracer with just a command-line editor, the second is a GUI layout/composition tool for it)... this doesn't sound too bad.
As for doing multiple circles... like you said, you can 'orbit' a moving object... so ... move IT in a circle in one axis... and then orbit it with what you're filming in the other axis.
Would be most intrigued to try it out. Would be interesting to see if I can't edit the demo to put in a "greenscreen", cos then I can put things over a matte from another program (the aforementioned raytracer, or Bryce, or whatever).
Oh nooes, I'm getting ideas and it's almost 1 am on a Thursday!!!
"City of Heroes. April 27, 2004 - August 31, 2012. Obliterated not with a weapon of mass destruction, not by an all-powerful supervillain... but by a cold-hearted and cowardly corporate suck-up."
*drool*
I've become the demoedit master in my sg recently. Only because I understand the script. Doing the math for movement and camera placement is not my forte. Though I can think in 3D. Gimme!
I guess you have to subscribe to watch it. I tried everything but that and couldn't find an option to watch your video.
Sweet! I can't wait to get my hands on this and play around with it. Maybe I can finally do the video that I've been thinking about for a while.
Amazing work Zloth!
Sparky - mutant elec/elec/elec blaster
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I guess you have to subscribe to watch it. I tried everything but that and couldn't find an option to watch your video.
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I'm not subscribed to that site and I watched it fine. Methinks the problem lies somewhere else, matey.
The new demo edit program is up!
Issues:
1. Big demos (over a megabyte) have always taken pretty long to load. When you do a move, the big listbox has to reload. If you are doing a lot of moves with a big demo then you might want to have a book handy.
2. I haven't tested this with demos that go through midnight. I have a hunch it won't work right. If you have a demo that starts at 23.9 or something, push it forward to 0.1.
3. Interface is 'ugly but servicable.' Controls aren't lined up, using the tab key to move around is going to be crazy, but at least the buttons actually do what the button text says it will do. Oh, and I haven't proofread the Readme yet.
Ooops, rats - I just remembered I didn't explain "Times around circle" in the readme. Well, it's pretty obvious. If you say 9 then the object will circle nine times between the start and end time. If you say 0.5 then it will only make half a circle.
Hey, does this thing help with camera movement?
I've got a particularly tricky camera movement I'm doing in an upcoming movie... it's basically just .25 of a circle, only using two dimensions (up/down and north/south) but during the whole time I'm trying to keep the camera pointed at one particular point, not a direction, which is what it wants to do.
Would this thing help with this?
Zeus - god of wondering and hope
Yep, provided that 'one point' is the center of the circle. If not, you'll have to do a few lines instead of a circle. If you're just doing a quarter circle, though, lines shouldn't be too bad - three of four of them should do it.
Hmmm, how regular is music these days? I'm thinking of changing the command time display to show beats instead of hours/minutes/seconds but that would be a precise, mathematical display. If the music slows down or speeds up even a little bit it's going to get off whack. ("American Music" from The Violent Femmes is right out. )
Nice work, Zloth! You might just inspire me to redo the parametric equation path thing in my demo editor to be usable by people who didn't major in math in college....
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I've got a particularly tricky camera movement I'm doing in an upcoming movie... it's basically just .25 of a circle, only using two dimensions (up/down and north/south) but during the whole time I'm trying to keep the camera pointed at one particular point, not a direction, which is what it wants to do.
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DrZeus -- if you need to get the camera tracking properly after using Zloth's movement path generator, you can use the "Auto PYR Wizard" from my editor. Basically, it will automatically create the PYR commands for a moving camera to track a moving object. The interface is more than a bit clunky (I'm more a mathematician than a programmer), but hopefully it's fairly self-explanatory. A word of warning: I haven't had time to do any serious updates on the program in months, so if it chokes on a demo file or you have other problems using it, drop me a PM and I'll see what I can do.
Quick little Video pumped up with a bit of demo editting. I've been working hard on my Demo Edit program so you can actually move objects around in straight lines or circles. Set the object, the start point, the start time, the end time, the end/center point, and maybe an object to face, hit the button, and the demo edit will move that object around. And it will do it without messing up anything else already in the demo!
Unfortunately, the interface is still on the nasty side (as in "deadly to pregnant women and people with pacemakers") but I think I can put the updated version up on my site either this weekend or next. It STILL won't be real pretty. You're going to need to know your X/Y/Z coordinates and be able to think in 3D but I'll at least try to make it so you don't have to specify all your angles in radians.
The vid starts with the camera panning along side my character (Tesslah), first facing Tesslah then a car. Then there's <ahem> a little mess (the camera is pointing where my character's feet would be if she were standing instead if flying - arg). Then a warshade pet starts spinning around Tess. Then a little Gear jumps in and spins around a different axis. Then one of those little protector bot things pops in and spins around a few feet under the warshade pet. I had a nice, slow camera pan over the top of Tesslah but the music ran out.
By the way, this was all done with free software. I Demodumped the demo at 8fps, loaded it in to Move Maker with 0.125 seconds per frame and no defined transition, popped in music from ftp.coh.com, quick title/credits, and there it was.
I'm hoping to re-do this showing off more demo edit tricks after I get the program polished and <groan> documented.