Hollywood-style viewpoint/camera movements?

[PlutonianEmpire]

Are there any .cel or .celx commands, or combinations of commands, that can have the viewpoint behave in a manner similar to the viewpoint movements of, say, a movie?

Example: The viewpoint slowly travels through interstellar space, approaches a planet, and then a surface point on the planet, with the viewpoint leveling with the horizon as it approaches the surface point at a low angle, with both the ground and the sky in the view.

Alternatively, the viewpoint would track the target planet while looping around the star system as it approaches, by flying past various objects while hopefully keeping those objects out of view (using ReferencePoints with no objects around them might also work for that, eliminating the need to keep them out of view), and then leveling with the horizon as it approaches the surface point.

Admittedly, I haven't touched the scripting arena of Celestia, save for a few simple .cel script files and "start.cel" modifications.

[selden]

Yes.

Crafting appropriate tour scripts by hand can be tedious, though.

There's at least one program (written in perl) which can generate tour scripts for you.

See the thread viewtopic.php?t=4757
The link to the tour generator is about 3/4 of the way down.

[PlutonianEmpire]

Yes.

Crafting appropriate tour scripts by hand can be tedious, though.

There's at least one program (written in perl) which can generate tour scripts for you.

See the thread http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4757
The link to the tour generator is about 3/4 of the way down.

Thanks, but how do I use it?

[selden]

Sorry, I've never used it. Perl scripts are plain text files which are interpreted by the Perl executable. You can use Notepad or other text editor to view the tour script. It seems to contain in-line documentation.

You'll also have to install a version of Perl on your computer. There are several freeware versions available.