Creating a Movie

One of Realtime Landscaping Plus’s exciting features is the ability to generate videos of your landscape designs. Videos are a great way to present your designs to others because they provide a guided experience that shows off the highlights of your landscaping ideas. Videos can be burned onto a CD or DVD to be played on any computer, or uploaded to YouTube or other website.

Before a movie can be created, a Realtime Camera object must be added to your design and configured to move through your landscape the way you wish the movie to. For details, see Adding a Realtime Camera.

To create a movie:

1.   Click View and Create movie The following dialog will appear:

Note: The dialog shown will depend on the version of Windows you are using.

2.   In the File name text field, type a name for your movie and then click the Save button. The following dialog will appear:

Camera name
The Camera name drop-down menu can be used to select which Realtime Camera you would like to use when creating your movie.

File name
The File name box shows what the name and location of your new movie will be. To change the name or location, click the “…” button that appears to the right of your file current name.

Resolution
The Resolution drop-down box can be used to select the size and clarity of your video. Higher resolutions take longer to create and will produce a larger video file, but will be higher quality. By clicking on the Resolution drop-down menu you can choose from several predefined resolutions, or click the Custom resolution option to input your own resolution. When creating movies for YouTube, recommended resolutions are 854x480 (480p), 1280x720 (720p), or 1920x1080 (1080p).

Video bitrate
The Video bitrate drop-down menu is used to select the quality at which the video is encoded. The bit rate has a large effect on the video’s quality and size. Recommended video bitrate is 20 Mbps.

Environment Settings
Click the Environment Settings button to open the Environment Settings dialog, which contains several different options that may affect how your movies and Realtime Walkthroughs appear. For example, the time of day, amount of wildlife, and sound settings are all controlled through the Environment Settings dialog.

3.   Click the OK button to begin the movie creation process. A typical video of a completed landscape design can take anywhere from several minutes to over an hour to complete. The time needed to create a video depends on the complexity of your landscape, the length of the movie (determined by the length and speed of your Realtime Camera), the movie resolution, the compression method chosen, and the speed of your computer. If you wish to abort the movie creation process, click the Cancel button.

Tips:

•      If your video card does not support DirectX 11, then a special Software rendering engine will be used. Unfortunately, it takes much longer than normal to create movies using this method.

•      You can use other programs or browse the internet during movie creation, but it is recommended to avoid running additional instances of Realtime Landscaping Plus or other 3D programs to avoid running low on video memory.

•      While a movie is being created you cannot edit the landscape or adjust the view. If you would like to make changes before the video completes, then you can abort the movie creation process by clicking the Cancel button.

•      The time of day, amount of wildlife (birds and butterflies), sound volume, and ambient sound that is included in the video is determined by the current Environment Settings. For more information, see Environment Settings.

See also:

Adding a Realtime Camera
Realtime Walkthrough
Environment Settings