Celestia Forums

I find celestia chugs along when using large deatiled textures due to my low spec vid card and machine. Is it at all posible instead of rendering out to a movie to render out to a series of stills which i can then stitch together ?

If this would be possible i am sure i could get a smooth movie out of celestia instead of the choppy ones i get now

You can use a CelX (lua) script to set the time and to take a snapshot.

See http://celestia.h-schmidt.net/celx-summ ... screenshot

It isn't a snpshot i want, what i want to do is render an animation but instead of the program saving to avi i want it to render out a serires of stills so that i can then make an ani in say virtualdub or videomach

that way i can avoid the choppyines of the vids


However this would need a render engine of some sort in celestia, how does it work at present is it some sort of beefed up screen capture when we do a save animation ?

paulselhi wrote:It isn't a snpshot i want, what i want to do is render an animation but instead of the program saving to avi i want it to render out a serires of stills so that i can then make an ani in say virtualdub or videomach

that way i can avoid the choppyines of the vids


However this would need a render engine of some sort in celestia, how does it work at present is it some sort of beefed up screen capture when we do a save animation ?

How about thinking to buy a new graphics card instead of having the Celestia devs work for quite a while on this

Bye Fridger

There seems to be some confusion of terminology.

When Celestia writes a JPEG or PNG "snapshot," it contains all of Celestia's graphical window.

Celestia's movie functionality (which currently does have timing problems) writes a portion of its graphical window to each frame of the resulting movie.

There are many ways to process a sequence of Celestia's snapshots to produce a sequence of frames that have the right proportions and resolution and to merge them into a stream of images for use in a movie. For example, you can run Celestia in a window that has the right size or you can post-process the frames to cut out an appropriate region and/or scale it to the resolution you need.

It is the responsibility of the CelX script to specify the appropriate simulated times for each frame. It is the responsibility of the video software to specify the appropriate real times for each frame so you have the right timing for PAL, NTSC or film. Whether the simulated times and the recorded times are supposed to be the same is your artistic decision.

t00fri wrote:How about thinking to buy a new graphics card instead of having the Celestia devs work for quite a while on this

Bye Fridger

I wasn't asking the devs to do anything..all i wanted to know was if there was a way to render to a series of stills as opposed to directly to an avi

paulselhi wrote:

t00fri wrote:How about thinking to buy a new graphics card instead of having the Celestia devs work for quite a while on this

Bye Fridger

I wasn't asking the devs to do anything..all i wanted to know was if there was a way to render to a series of stills as opposed to directly to an avi

If there was I would have told you . I am one of the devs.

Indeed, Celestia does not have a built-in method of directly generating a sequence of stills. However, you can write your own CelX script which will cause Celestia to create a sequence of stills. Celestia's CelX scripts use the Lua programming language. Writing such a script does not require any work on the part of any of Celestia's developers.

If you don't know how to write such a script and can't afford the time to learn, you should consider making a posting to the Celestia Scripting forum asking for help.

I think this is a sufficiently generic problem that you are not the only person who would use such a script. I suspect it already exists somewhere since (at the moment) it's the only way to generate Celestia movies under MacOS.

I know that this is not rendering a set of stills, but you do have another option. You can use a software called Camtasia Studio (you need the recorder part of it). This software allows you to record what is being displayed on the screen (either a part of the screen or the whole thing). I believe that this software records off of your video card. Personally, I have not tried using such software on a type of video card that you have, but I think its worth a shot.

CEVfuture