SwiftVR Tutorial

SwiftVR Tutorial

You do not need to know how to program in actionscript or do anything technical in particular to make your own tour, SwiftVR is designed to make VR tour design easy.

Playing Youtube Videos in SwiftVR

The tutorial will show you how to play back flv files in the tour, this is the info you need to retrieve the flv file address for a youtube video. To get a youtube flv address, copy the youtube url of the video that you want to the clipboard and go to http://keepvid.com/. Paste your URL into the provided field and click the download button. An flv link and an mp4 link will be displayed on the keepvid page, just below the URL you pasted. Right-click the flv link and copy the location to the clipboard. There is only one thing left to do to get a URL for the flv that is recognised by SwiftVR - append &.flv to the end of the URL. This is what you copy into the parameter for the URL in the media player widget in SwiftVR.

Making a SwiftVR Tour

Before you make a tour you need to create 360 degree panoramas for each of your 'shots'. The final width of a panorama must not exceed 3000px, this seems to be a limitation of Koolmoves. It is up to you how to make the panorama images, there are a number of programs that assist in this process.

The easiest way to make a tour is to use the downloaded source files for the sample SwiftVR project. Start with shot1.fun, load it up into KoolMoves and delete the panorama image. Go to File->Import and import your panoramic image. Change the depth of the image to send it to the back. Ensure that your image is placed at 0,0.

Pan around the scene and you will see three movieclips. The crosshair is the 'north point'. SwiftVR can automatically resolve the direction from shot to shot providing you always tell it which way is north. When you photograph your panorama, take a compass with you and place a marker on the ground showing the north point on every 'shot'. If you don't have an actual northpoint to place the marker onto you'll have to guestimate it.

In the sample shot1, mc3 and ArrowsHolder (the two green triangles at the top) are both markers for 'walking through' to the next scene. You make copies of these movieclips (make a complete copy of movie frames) to make new walkthrough placeholders. The idea is to drag these movieclips into position on your image at places where you walk through to the next shot.

To configure your walkthrough markers, you right-click and select properties. From there, you select Parameters and click the (...) button to bring up the clip parameters. In there, you enter the new shot swf that you are going to walk through to, and optionally, a heading. Making a heading of 'current' will make you face the same direction you were facing the new direction when you walk into the new shot. This saves you figuring out actual headings between shots. Setting your northpoint accurately on each shot makes the 'current' setting always face you to the right direction when walking through. If you examine the sample walkthrough this will be fairly obvious.

The movieclip mc4 in the sample shot1.fun is the mediaplayer placeholder. This will play a given movieclip for the viewer. Once again, the settings are in the parameters. The parameters you need to change are VideoURL and VideoDescript. Instructions for linking to a youtube video are under the heading "Playing Youtube Videos in SwiftVR" at the start of this tutorial. You can copy this movieclip to locations in your tour which are close to locations you want to provide video for - you can place them wherever you like.

Repeat this process for each 'shot' in your tour. The trick is to make sure you have walkthrough placeholders that always go back to where you came from. If you get tricky you can even start to position these placeholders from afar so you can jump across to other scenes without the need to follow a rigid path.

The easiest way to learn how it works is to play with the parameters in the sample tour, and make new walkthrough placeholders in that tour.

To be continued...

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