OTOY Forums

Version 1.2 Now with Bezier smoothing



Introduction to Ol' Ready Cam (ORC)
Hola, from Middle-earth.
Herein you'll find a camera key frame animation script for Octane Standalone; it also comes with a camera exporter for Blender which has been incorporated in the Blender Community Plugin. Please note however, that the animations can be created directly in Octane Standalone with no need of an exporter. The exporters are nice for the precision of camera placement.
The script incorporates some code and ideas found in other scripts of the forum.
Thanks for this goes to Thomas Loockx, Roeland, gmillas, Jason Grimes, Mark Bassett & Matej Moderc.
Credit for the output file naming goes to linvanchene in dialog with ekoja, kavorka, and ROUBAL which they hashed out at http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&p=190212#p190212

Script Installation
Here are a couple of quick images showing installation of the Lua scripts and Blender addon. See below for a PDF which goes more in-depth with some usages notes.



Using ORC Within Octane

* Open an existing project, and click on a Render Target node.
* You can add frames by pressing Alt A or selecting Ol Ready Add located in Octane’s Script menu. If Ol Ready Add does not appear in the menu, try selecting Reload Scripts in the Script menu. If still nothing, the scripts were not properly installed.
* The number one rule in adding a key frame is to first select a Render Target node if more than one is present and especially if multiple cameras are being used. ORC will warn you if this condition exists and tell you which one it will use. This however, may not correspond to the current camera view meaning that every frame you add will be for the exact same position from the camera to which ORC defaulted.
* It is best to use the Camera Picker tool to set the camera’s target before adding a frame. You may get unexpected results if you don’t do this. When Octane’s camera is moved around, the position and target change but the target might end up 10 meters in one place and 10,000 in another. You’ll quickly learn when you need not use it and when you need it.

Creating Key Frames
So now the repeated workflow for adding frames is this:

* Move the camera to the desired position and click with the camera picker if needed.
* Press Alt A to get the dialog box
* Click Add Frame.

The Main Script
After having added the desired number of frames:

* Press Alt R to run Ol' Ready Cam.
* Sliders and preview buttons in the Key Frame tab will give immediate feedback for the the frames you created with Ol Ready Add. At this point it is best just to explore the tabs and functions. It is suggested that you keep a render target using the Info channel kernel with shading normals available as 1 sample ppx can create a quick clean render for quickly viewing an animation.

Changes for version 1.21
8/14/14

1. Fixed a Bezier smoothing problem where gaps were being made at the bounding control points.
2. Slight tweak to solar movement where complete range wasn't showing for fewer than 10 frames.

Changes for version 1.2
8/11/14

1. Added a global setting called Bezier Smoothing located in the Key Frame tab. This can be adjusted to set the desired smoothness of transitions between key frames.
2. In the Animation tab, the Starting Sequence field has been renamed Starting # and placed within the Frame Range settings just above the Start frame number. Starting # controls the start of the sequence numbers used in the image file names.

Installation Instructions


ORC Version 1.21 August 14, 2014


Edit: updated version for Octane 3.00:
OlReadyCam_3.0.zip

Blender Community Plugin Version 1.52

Excellent! Looks very nice!

Jason

damn that's really good. will you release it?
it would be perfect if it will have some kind of keyframe-set batch render like octane power tools had (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24gJAkZ2F_w) in order to store all movements (and eventually render passes or daylight setups) and render everything overnight.

great job btw

Thank you Jason and knot515.
And yes knot515 it will be released as soon as I get a little video showing how it can be used with Blender. Hopefully by the end of the week or beginning of next. Having done a pre-release announcement has been to gauge how much interest there is in scripts like this. It makes one decide how much time to put in documenting installation, etc...So far, it looks like most users must be using the packaged plugins. Time will tell.

As far as batch processing, it would be on a subsequent release. If you've seen the 'Batch Output Render Targets' script by Mark and Thomas, I could base it on that except that it would work with ORC project files. But before that, people first need to see what this script can do. If you been using multiple render targets as a means to do separate product shots, you can condense them into one and just save multiple positions to an ORC file.

- Mtl

This is a miracle! I've been waiting for this for years This lets me create some flythroughs without a need of .abc and external apps.

Can't wait to test it. Great job

Most Excellent!!!!!
Can you key frame an existing ABC animated file

i.e. animated geom but not camera... and you use your tool to animate cam

thanks

Thank you Smicha, but no miracle here, merely human endeavor. Miracles are what you've had in Poland with the demise of communism and now with a new saint in St John Paul. Great things for Poland and the world.

p3taoctane, if this could handle alembic, I'd just be using alembic. No, this is just a simple camera and sun animator which was really written to find a shot between point A and B, though it evolved beyond that. I'm sure everyone has struggled with Octane's camera when working with heavy geometry. You want to move the camera just a tad but all of a sudden it is in Timbuktu. Now to get a shot, save the camera position before you move the camera, move it off the edge of your virtual world and save another position. The shot you want is probably somewhere in between. Lua is quite capable of being used for writing a full blown animator with texture blending, and any other thing that can be interpolated in Octane's node graph... but I'll leave that to younger, more eager programmers who will do it for the shear joy coding. I'm quite over the hill having written my first program in 1976 and entering it with keypunch cards.

I'll be working today to get the code posted.
-Mtl

Thanks for the info effort and... far from over the hill good sir

Well, version v1.1 has been set in the first post of the thread.
I may have to make a PDF of the instructions but hopefully what's there is enough to go by.
-Mtl

Long night before me
Marcus surprised me here
viewtopic.php?f=73&t=41388&p=197535#p197535
and now it is time for some animation

Greetings from beautiful Poland.