Dragonfly

[Piatzin]

A couple of months ago I made some boats and, after noticing they looked pretty aerodynamic, decided to slap some wings onto them. The result ended up looking pretty decent in my opinion, and the video I recorded with them was an improvement over my previous content, so I thought I would share it:

There's a couple of differences between the plane in the video and the latest version though. The wings no longer clip through the fuselage, for one (somehow I missed that before recording) and I also added a pair of struts to fix the floppiness. Currently looking to squeeze a bit more maneuverability into their frames.

Anyways...I would link to KerbalX at this point, but for some reason it crashes every time I try to save the draft...

Side note, if anyone wants to offer feedback on the video, that would be welcomed. I unfortunately can't do much about the lag. There were approximately 575 parts involved in the battle, which my laptop can normally run at a playable level, but with the recording software open at the same time it made things pretty choppy. I sped the footage up by 300% and tried to edit out all the lag I noticed, but the editing program I use isn't exactly laptop-friendly either and the playback is anything but fluid. So I don't actually see the stutters before the final render, unless I go through every clip frame by frame and count how many frames there are between each frame. It's a hassle.

[Catto]

The last thing i WOULDN'T wanna hear is the humming of a giant dragonfly.

With guns, of course.

[Entropian]

7 hours ago, Earthlinger said:

Side note, if anyone wants to offer feedback on the video, that would be welcomed. I unfortunately can't do much about the lag. There were approximately 575 parts involved in the battle, which my laptop can normally run at a playable level, but with the recording software open at the same time it made things pretty choppy. I sped the footage up by 300% and tried to edit out all the lag I noticed, but the editing program I use isn't exactly laptop-friendly either and the playback is anything but fluid. So I don't actually see the stutters before the final render, unless I go through every clip frame by frame and count how many frames there are between each frame. It's a hassle.

I've run into this problem before with my 3000+ part craft.  I also use a laptop, so I get around 2 seconds per frame on launch.  I've found that a really easy and significantly less time-consuming method of getting rid of the stutters is duplicate frame decimation (mpdecimate) in FFmpeg.  The command I use for my cinematics gets rid of the duplicate frames and exports a 60fps video - here's the framework:

ffmpeg -i [SOURCE FILE PATH] -an -vf mpdecimate,setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB*60/60,fps=60 [EXPORT FILE PATH]

[Piatzin]

12 minutes ago, Entropian said:

ffmpeg -i [SOURCE FILE PATH] -an -vf mpdecimate,setpts=N/FRAME_RATE/TB*60/60,fps=60 [EXPORT FILE PATH]

The sum of my experience with anything more technical than zip files and mod installation is a smattering of Python but I'll look into this, thanks

Edit: Gosh I've learned like five new words already

Edited May 6, 2022 by Earthlinger

[Entropian]

It's definitely worth the time to figure it out.  Installing FFmpeg and using it through the command prompt is difficult for some at first but it's by far the easiest method of smoothing out video footage I've used so far.

Also, if your end footage ends up being too sped-up, you can use Time Control's slow-mo function to slow your game down and get slower and smoother footage.

[TokiGlassBlower]

As one of your 4 subscribers this one was good one.......

[Piatzin]

35 minutes ago, TokiGlassBlower said:

As one of your 4 subscribers this one was good one.......

Heh heh, thanks