Flight paths from points of interest
Building a fly-through used to mean flying the camera to every shot in turn and pressing Add View. You can still do that — but you no longer have to.
Instead, mark the places on the outcrop you want the tour to show. On the Flight Path ribbon tab choose Add POI and click the rock; each click drops a point of interest. Press Esc when you have placed them all, then press Auto Generate.
The important part is what a point of interest is. It is not a camera position — it is the subject. VRGS works out where to stand the camera to see it, which way to face, and how long to take. It fits the overall orientation of the face, bends the standoff towards each point's own surface so the camera follows bays and noses rather than cutting across them, and checks the line of sight against the real geometry instead of putting the camera inside the rock.
Set a point's Type to change what happens when the tour reaches it — Look At to stand off and face it, Rotate Around to circle it, or Traverse Anchor to steer a face-on traverse without stopping there.
Two commands are worth running straight afterwards:
- Check Path walks the whole flight and finds anywhere the camera passes through the outcrop — the curve, not just the keyframes, because a spline between two clear keyframes can still bulge through a buttress. It shows you the problem, then offers to nudge the surrounding viewpoints clear.
- Constant Speed re-paces the path from the distance actually flown, so the camera stops crawling through short segments and rocketing through long ones. The total duration does not change.
Generated keyframes are ordinary viewpoints. Treat Auto Generate as a first pass: generate, then drag, reorder and re-time whatever needs it. Bear in mind that running it again replaces the keyframes — the dialog warns you when it can see edits you have made.
Placing points of interest, Auto Generate and Constant Speed work in both renderers. Check Path and the Keep the camera out of the outcrop tick inside Auto Generate need the Vulkan view.
Full detail — every setting in the dialog, the three patterns, the property table for a point of interest, and what to do when a path still clips the rock — is in the Flight Path User Guide.