Flight Paths: Narration and Presentation
A flight path becomes a guided tour when it talks: narration, holds, and slides for presenting it live. Creating a path, capturing viewpoints, playing it back and recording a movie are in the Flight Path User Guide.
Narration: guided tours
A flight path can carry spoken commentary. Record it against the moving camera, or import audio you prepared elsewhere, and it plays in step with the picture — turning a fly-through into a self-guided virtual field trip a student can open and watch on their own.
Narration requires the Vulkan renderer. Clips authored here are saved with the project either way, but the OpenGL view will not play them.
Adding narration
Right-click anywhere on the timeline and choose:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
| Record while the tour plays… | Starts the tour from the time you right-clicked and records as it flies, with nothing covering the 3D view — so you can describe what you are looking at. Stop with the same menu item, Esc, or by pausing. |
| Record here (tour paused)… | Records with the tour parked at that moment. A small dialog shows elapsed time and a level meter; press Cancel to stop. Best for a stop-and-talk clip, where the camera is not moving anyway. |
| Import audio file… | Brings in an existing WAV, MP3, M4A or WMA file, placed at the time you right-clicked. |
While recording over live playback the Narration track shows ● REC, the elapsed time and a live level meter — check the level is moving before you commit to a long take. Any narration already on the path is muted for the duration, so the microphone does not pick up your earlier commentary through the speakers.
All three appear on the Narration track once the path has clips, and on the timeline's general right-click menu before that — the track only appears once there is something to show.
Recordings are normalised when you stop, so a quiet microphone still gives usable narration. Imported files are left exactly as they are.
Narration files are copied into the project, into an AUDIO folder beside your other project data. A tour whose audio lives on one person's desktop would be silent for everyone else, so VRGS takes its own copy; the project folder is what backups, version control and cloud sync carry.
How narration and the camera stay together
While a clip is playing, the audio leads and the picture follows. If the display cannot keep up on a heavy scene, the camera skips frames to stay with the voice rather than letting the commentary drift out of step. Between clips the tour carries on at its normal rate, picking up exactly where the audio left off.
The practical consequence: what you hear in preview is what you get in the recorded movie, on any machine.
Timing narration
Clip positions are stored in seconds, not frames. Anything that rebuilds the interpolated path — toggling motion blur, changing the project frame rate — therefore leaves your commentary where you put it, instead of shifting it around.
Drag a clip along the Narration track to move it. Clips show a waveform, so you can line the start of a phrase up against a keyframe by eye rather than by guesswork. A clip's length comes from its audio file and cannot be trimmed here — record or edit a shorter take instead.
Pinning commentary to a keyframe
By default a clip sits at a fixed time. That is fine until you re-time the path — lengthen the approach to the outcrop, change the frame rate, drag a keyframe — and every piece of commentary after the change is suddenly describing the wrong thing.
Pin the clip to its keyframe instead. Right-click the clip and choose Pin to nearest keyframe. The clip snaps onto that keyframe and gets a small white tack at its left edge, and from then on it travels with the keyframe: re-time the segment and the commentary moves with it.
- Dragging a pinned clip snaps it from keyframe to keyframe and re-pins it where it lands, so it stays pinned.
- Right-click and choose Pinned to keyframe N (unpin) to release it back to a fixed time, where it is now.
- If you delete the keyframe a clip is pinned to, the clip stays exactly where it is and quietly becomes unpinned — it is never moved somewhere you did not put it.
Stop-and-talk clips are the ones that most want pinning: the whole point of a stop is that it belongs to a place, not to a moment.
On-screen captions
A clip can carry text that appears over the 3D view while it plays — a formation name, an age, a question for the group.
Right-click the clip and choose Add on-screen caption…, and type the text. It can run to several lines. The caption appears centred along the bottom of the view while its clip is sounding, wrapped to fit, and disappears when the clip ends. It is also drawn inside the clip's bar on the timeline, so you can see at a glance which take carries which words.
Leave the box empty to remove a caption.
Managing clips
Right-click a clip on the Narration track:
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
| Stop and talk | Turns the clip into a stop — the tour parks at that point while the commentary plays (see below). |
| Wait for Continue | For a stop: wait for you to press Continue instead of moving on when the clip ends. |
| Pin to nearest keyframe | Tie the clip to a keyframe so re-timing the path carries it along (see above). Reads Pinned to keyframe N (unpin) once it is pinned. |
| Add / Edit on-screen caption … | Text shown over the 3D view while this clip plays. |
| Volume, Fade in, Fade out | Level for this clip, and how it eases in and out. |
| Delete narration clip | Removes the clip from the path. Ctrl+Z puts it back — the audio file survives until you next save, at which point a take nothing references is cleaned up. |
Every clip edit — moving, pinning, captioning, deleting, changing volume or fades — is a single undo step, so Ctrl+Z puts it back.
A clip drawn grey has lost its audio file, usually because a project was copied without its AUDIO folder. It keeps its place on the timeline so you can see what is missing, but it will not sound; re-import the audio to fix it.
Stop and talk
Continuous voice-over is rarely what teaching sounds like. The real shape is fly to the outcrop, stop, talk about it, carry on — and that is what a stop-and-talk clip does.
Right-click a clip and choose Stop and talk. It changes from a bar to an orange pin, because a stop occupies no time on the timeline: the tour parks at that point for exactly as long as the commentary lasts, however long that turns out to be.
When the tour reaches the pin:
- The camera stops on that frame and the clip starts playing.
- You can look around while it plays — orbit, zoom, fly — exactly as when paused. The tour is holding its place, not frozen.
- If you leave it alone, the view drifts slowly around the spot rather than sitting dead still, so a long piece of commentary does not look like the application has hung. The moment you touch the camera the drift stops and it is yours.
- When the clip finishes, the tour carries on by itself.
Because a stop takes no timeline space, replacing its commentary with a longer or shorter take changes nothing else. The path does not need rebuilding and every clip after it stays exactly where you put it — which is not true of the old approach of padding a path with extra frames.
A stop can wait for an explicit Continue rather than moving on by itself — useful when you want to take questions. Right-click the pin and tick Wait for Continue. The Play button becomes Continue while the tour is held.
Playing a tour to a field trip
A narrated tour can be played to everyone in a Virtual Field Trip at once, with every participant's camera following the leader's.
Only the transport is shared — play, pause, position. The narration itself plays from each person's own copy of the project, so nothing is streamed and the audio is as clean for the person on a hotel wifi as for the one next to the server.
Every participant must have the same project open locally. A guest who cannot open the project cannot join a tour — they would have no outcrop to look at either.
To lead a tour:
- Make sure the project is saved. A flight path only gets the shared identity other clients can resolve when it is saved, and an unsaved path will be refused.
- Right-click anywhere on the timeline and choose Share as a guided tour for the field trip. This appears only when you are the leader of a live trip.
- Everyone's copy of VRGS now loads the tour's geometry, including anyone who joins the trip afterwards. The transport readout counts them in — Waiting for 3 of 9 to load…
- When it says Everyone is ready, press Play. The tour starts on every machine at once.
The wait is not optional politeness — it is what stops three participants freezing mid-flight and then being yanked forward to catch up. If someone is wedged, the readout eventually offers press Play to start anyway, and the tour begins without them.
As a participant: the tour simply starts, and your camera follows. Press Play at any point to step out and look around on your own; the tour carries on for everybody else. Your own stops, pauses and captions all behave exactly as they do in a solo tour.
There is no roster display of who has stepped out, and no one-click "catch up" to re-join the group where they now are. Rejoin by restarting the tour on your machine.
A narrated tour can be exported as a video with its commentary — including its stops, which become real time in the file. See Recording a movie. The one thing a video cannot do is wait for you, so a stop set to Wait for Continue is held for the length of its clip instead.
Presentation mode and slides
A flight path can carry a slide deck (the Slides branch in the tree). Right-click Slides → Add image to add images to it, then link individual slides to viewpoints so that the relevant slide is shown as a billboard overlay as the camera reaches each viewpoint. Link either way round: Link To Viewpoint on a slide, or Link To Slide on a viewpoint. Step through viewpoints with Next VP and Previous VP, and toggle the overlay with Presentation. This is useful for guided, narrated tours.
Slide billboards are drawn in both renderers — a Vulkan view shows the deck, and its multi-image slides have working prev/next/resize handles in the 3D view. The presentation-mode controls on the ribbon (Next VP, Previous VP and Presentation) are still OpenGL-only and are greyed out in a Vulkan view.
For a narrated tour, on-screen captions on the narration clips are usually the better tool — they need no images, travel with the commentary, and work in the Vulkan view where narration lives.
Video and audio in the scene
A flight path's own Slides branch takes still images only. To put a video
clip with its soundtrack into the outcrop itself, place a
billboard in the Data tree and add an
.mp4, .avi or .mov to it. The clip plays in the 3D scene, with sound,
complete with a play/pause, rewind, repeat and scrub strip along the top of the
board — and the camera simply flies past it like anything else in the scene.
Recording a movie handles this correctly: during an offline capture the clip is driven by the movie's own frame clock rather than the wall clock, so it plays at natural speed in the finished video instead of racing through at render speed.
Narration is the commentary about the tour — it belongs to the path, moves with your keyframes, and can stop the camera while you talk. A billboard video is a piece of media inside the scene, fixed where you put it. A tour can carry both — but they are separate sound sources with no ducking between them, so plan a stop-and-talk around a billboard clip rather than talking over it.