Release: Rviz Cinematographer - Create Professionally Looking Camera Trajectories Easily

ROS Projects
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Visualizing 3D data as a 2D projection - a common case in Rviz - usually comes with a tradeoff.
Static visualizations suffer at least from a partial loss of depth information for the audience.
Dynamic visualizations on the contrary are either tedious to generate or seem like the deadline was closer than expected.

I’ve build an rqt plugin to conveniently specify camera motions in Rviz in a matter of minutes.
A short example trajectory - created with 5 clicks, including one to trigger the camera motion - is provided below.

rviz_cinematographer

A more sophisticated example is presented on the project’s github page.

Just clone it into your workspace, build it and use it along with Rviz.
No non-ROS dependencies.
Detailed instructions and illustrations, if needed, are provided on the project page.

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I’ve added an option to directly record videos - using the images rendered by rviz during a camera motion induced by the Rviz Cinematographer.
You can choose the frame rate you want.
The motion is rendered frame by frame guaranteeing smooth motions in the video even if the frame rate of rviz drops - e.g. due to large point clouds or slow hardware.

Furthermore the code was successfully tested on Ros Melodic.

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