Found another use case for KonsolScript! Scripting Visual FX for videos. 😀
Yes, is some ways it still is game-related — kind of like scripting an explosion when the player throws a bomb or something. But this use case is basically pre-rendering FX then saving it as frames to be used as a clip on a video.
No, KonsolScript doesn’t have the capability to create an image file on your disk. Yet. But with a few modifications, it does now. 😀
Introducing Screen:Capture(filename) command!
I figured, this function can also be used when you want your players help you debug your game.
Visual FX does sound like an exaggeration to describe my experiment. It’s actually more of automating my task of doing a simple animation for a skateboarding video ad. But still, any one can always script a particle system and use it as a Visual FX of a fire, smoke, or explosion for a clip — and I believe KonsolScript can do that as well.
You may not know this but I’ve long been restraining myself from using proprietary tools (except for Windows so I could make sure Quixie does run on Windows as it does on GNU/Linux, and except for Windows Movie Maker — let’s face it, there really is no other good Free and Open Source video editing software that runs right out of the box and is easy to use).
So I’ve created a 30-second video using only Free and Open Source software namely GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, FFMPEG, and KonsolScript — with Windows Movie Maker being the only non-FOSS software involved (and Windows, of course).
So where did KonsolScript came in to the view? It was when I needed a transition of the following photo below.
I’m pretty sure that no other ready-made open source video editing tool (not even Movie Maker) could do this simple animation.
With time running out, there’s no way I could learn Blender’s Video Sequence editor and do this simple less-than-two-seconds animation. In less than 5 minutes, I updated Quixie, wrote the script for the animation and I’m done!
It’s not officially out yet — I’m still working on the release-process like committing it on SVN, updating the installer, etc.
Just a side note, we currently have a company activity that includes video editing — I’m excited to see how KonsolScript will help in generating some of the effects/animation.
~creek23
Leave a Reply