Creating a Movie

One of Realtime Landscaping’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 design’s highlights.

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

To create a movie:

1. From the View menu, click Create Movie.

2. Navigate to the folder where you want to save the movie and enter the desired filename.

3. Click Save. The following dialog will appear:

Camera name
Select which Realtime Camera you would like to use when creating your movie.

File name
The name and location where your movie will be created.

Format
Select which format you want to use, either H.264 or H.265. H.264 is recommended because it is widely supported and included with Windows.

H.265, also known as High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is more efficient than H.264. It tends to produce higher quality compression and smaller files than H.264. However, H.265 is not currently included with Windows and must be purchased from the Microsoft Store.

Resolution
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. You can choose from several predefined resolutions, or click the Custom resolution option to input your own resolution.

To create a 360-degree movie, select 4096x2048 (360 degree). This will create a movie which will allow you to look around while the movie is playing. Both YouTube and Facebook support 360-degree movies.

Video bitrate
The bit rate determines the amount of data used to represent each second of the video. The bit rate has a large effect on the video’s quality and size. Increasing the bit rate will result in a higher quality video, but it will take longer to create and will result in a larger file size.

Frames/second
Number of frames to capture per second. 30 is recommended, but this can be increased up to 60 if desired.

4. Click OK to begin the movie creation process. The time needed to create a video depends on the complexity of your landscape, whether Global Illumination is enabled, 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. To abort the movie creation process, click Cancel.

Tips:

• When Global Illumination is enabled, the video will take much longer to create. We recommend only using this feature for your final renders.

• You can use other programs or browse the Internet during movie creation, but we recommend against running additional instances of Realtime Landscaping or other 3D software 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 Cancel.

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