Guild of Writers

We could actually just have some separate prps that we page in manually with Python when we want to flyby-around.

A rather old idea of mine is the pageable camera-rig.

You know, I was looking at the Myst IV flyby for Haven. I'd LOVE to figure out a way to do the same wave breaker action you see on the rocks by the ship.

I think it can be done with animated textures......but whew, trying to figure it out. It look too cool in Zephyr though.

They would've done a fluid simulation while recording the video

Pretty much. (that or they filmed real watter splashing against a black background but that doesn't sound easy to do)
That's typically the kind of thing that you can only do well by using a video with an alpha channel as a texture.. But making that kind of video is pretty hard; and finding one is near impossible. You'd need to buy some high end video texture library. (and those are usually pretty expensive)
You can try some things with regular animated textures and really complex shaders but it won't look as good and the performance hit will probably be bigger. Some particles would help too of course.
It's the kind of effect we only see in pre-calculated 3D.

We could approximate the effect with animated alpha textures and particles, or do fluid simulations in Blender (which is not a half-bad idea!), but the first one wouldn't look as good as the real thing, and the second wouldn't fit the look of the Age in URU.

-Kato

BTW, with the new off-line userKI, there is a quick way to make a fluid camera movement:
- go to a good place for a starting point
- select 3rd-person view
- type /stopcam
- move your avatar to a good final position
- type /gocam

The camera will fly to your avatar in one smooth movement. If you select your start and end points carefully this may be all you need.

That's an interesting trick; I guess it only works in straight lines though right?

Yes, but you can get interesting effects if you carefully select your angles. Maybe the camera also avoids colliders, I haven't checked on that.

I played with this more in Blender.

You can set your Flyby camera up. As you advance the camera, use Camera View. You can move the camera about while looking through it, using the G key and the X, Y, And Z key to do banks, rolls, dives, climbs, you name it. Gives you much finer control than anything else.

Of course you need to have the Age in blender. I've been playing with this with like Zephyr Cove. I've got a REALLY neat flyby movie. And I've got it to where when you link to zephyr it plays the flyby movie first (revealing nothing really). It's a real rush because you scream fast and low over the ocean towards the beach. Lot of fun.

Why do I have the feeling we'll soon find the upended skeleton of a sailship on the beach in Zephyr Cove?