Hello! For the last few months, I’ve been developing an animation plugin that is to be used most likely for video making. And I am planning on making a function for the plugin to “Render”.
So I’ve been thinking of making an external program (as mentioned in the title) that takes a screenshot of each frame (there will be cooldowns). I’ve also seen few people doing something similar such as:
- CloneTrooper1019 (https://twitter.com/CloneTeee1019/status/1129444718667063298, I couldn’t find the original tweet.)
- VineyardVine and Vidgeon (RoRender)
so I’m guessing it is indeed possible to send data from Studio to other programs.
I’ve also made 2 concepts for it.
Concept 1
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User just finished his animation, ready for rendering.
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User clicks on “render” from the plugin, then “connect”. At the same time, in the external program, he clicks “host”.
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Studio and external program makes a connection. After the user proceeds by clicking “Render” button on the window, every frame of the animation is being screenshotted from a signal sent by the external program.
Concept 2
Practically, the same concept but with a different way of screenshotting. This time, the external program takes the screenshot and saves it to the desired directory that is chosen by the user.
How will the connection work?
- Studio sends a signal that gets recognized by the program as “screenshotting is available”.
- Program takes the screenshot, and saves it. Afterwards, it sends Studio another signal to move onto the next frame.
This goes on and on until every frame of the animation is screenshotted.
I believe the second concept would work better since it shouldn’t touch anything in Studio.
My problem is, I have never experimented something that involves outside of Studio. So, I’m a bit unexperienced about these kinds of things. You could provide articles, APIs or even send a PM.
If you see a mistake with my methods, be sure to tell me. I am incredibly new here, and I am looking forward to fit in this community.
Thank you for reading!