In Praise of Cartoons - Open GL movie?

[Anonymous]

Recently we've been taking client groups on a real-time "walk throughs" of projects using a digital projector and laptop.

A recent presentation was a resounding success - everyone realized our model was not perfectly resolved but the movement through the spaces made the project more "real" for our clients than some previously "perfected" still renderings did. People preferred the quick-and-dirty-and-dynamic OpenGL cartoon to the time-consuming still shots.

We had a nice philosophical discussion about the tendency to find flaw with rendered images that in their attempt to come across as perfect suffer because everyone notices - and pays attention to - tiny technical flaws of material texture or lighting rather than *thinking* about the project.

So here's our question and need - what is the best way - meaning most time-efficient - to capture an Open GL walk-through? Is there some sort of "screen-capture" technology out there that will record a movie of a manually-navigated walk-through? Or would it still be best to set up a path and generate a movie automatically?

We have some experience in the office creating various Quicktime VR scenes and stills with Artlantis Studio but have almost zero experience with packaging a movie.

Of course - and this may horrify most of the readers of the Rendering forum - the advantage to us is that there will be *no* special lighting at all - just get the materials and textures almost OK and we're up and running.

The idea is that this movie can be burned to disc and played as a loop at an upcoming building fund-raising event.

Thank you so much for your recommendations.

[stefan]

You can make screen-captured movies with

Camtasia (commercial/Win)
http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Wink (Free/Win+Linux)
http://www.debugmode.com/wink
(They also have a movie editor)

There are many others.

If you are fine with just textures and no shadows, you can use a VRML model and display it in realtime with some of the many VRML viewers.
E.g. Cortona VRML Client (Win+Mac)
http://www.parallelgraphics.com/products/cortona