Advanced Camera Animations

This update focuses less on what gets exported from Minecraft, and more on what gets imported into Minecraft. In particular, camera animations can now be exported from Blender and imported back into the game.

It's no secret that the exporter is not perfect. And while it's had major improvements as of late, there will always be edge-cases where it just fails, and rendering in-engine is the only option. Importing external camera animations into your replays provides the ability to use Blender's advanced animation toolset with Minecraft's native renderer, giving you the best of both worlds.

Usage

In Blender, select your animated camera and go to File > Export > Camera Animation (.xml). In the window that opens, choose your output file and click "Export Camera XML".

Note: If your camera has constraints, it might be a good idea to bake the action first. Exporting animations with constraints can lead to unexpected results.

Next, launch Minecraft and open your replay file. Open the Hotkey GUI using the hamburger button in the bottom left corner and select "Import Camera".

This will open the Camera Manager, where you will see a list of all animated cameras in the file. To import a new camera, click the large "Import Camera" button at the bottom. This will open a file browser, where you should select the xml file you exported from Blender. Once the camera is in your file, the game sees it as an entity. Just like in the Player Overview, click the name in the Camera Manager and add a spectator keyframe so your camera can be rendered.

It's important to note however, that although they present as entities, animated cameras are not entities. They are evaluated based on the replay timeline instead of the game timeline, so time keyframes have no effect on them. If the timing of a camera needs to be adjusted, it must be done in Blender.

Warning: Once an animated camera is used, your replay is no longer compatible with the vanilla Replay Mod. It will still open without this extension, but all your animated cameras will be gone.

Changes

• Camera animation exporting in Blender.

  • Re-wrote the half-written exporter from the previous version.

• Camera animation importing.

  • Wrote animated camera module to handle imported cameras.

  • Created TimelineUpdateEvent that's fired whenever the replay timeline is updated.

  • Added the relevant framework for custom camera path rendering.

  • Created Camera Manager and Camera Editor UI.

  • Wrote various jGUI utility classes used in the Camera Manager and Camera Editor.

• Internal code changes.

  • Created RenderUtils and FutureUtils utility classes.

  • Fixed XMLUtils.

  • Created ReplayModHooks class.

    • onReplayModInit allows for mod initialization code that requires the Replay Mod to have been initialized already.

• Vcap test commands are now disabled unless game is in a development environment.