Glossary

Blender objects in a scene can be grouped into collections. Collections are listed in the Outliner editor. Skybrush Studio for Blender uses collections to group drones, formations and drone object templates. For more information on collections in general, please read the official Blender documentation.

This collection contains all your drone objects. It is created automatically with the "Create Takeoff Grid" operator, and you can re-assign it to a different collection in the Swarm tab if needed.

A formation is a collection of markers, placed as a sub-collection in the dedicated Formations collection. Each marker specifies the desired position of one drone within the formation. Formations may be static or dynamic; in case of a dynamic formation, one must animate the positions of the markers within the formation using the standard Blender animation tools. You can read more about formations in the Key concepts chapter.

This collection contains all your formations, which are also collections. A formation contains markers (see below) that specify the desired position of each drone within the formation.

The Formations tab is a Skybrush-specific new tab in the sidebar of the 3D Viewport editor that contains one panel that allows you to create formations and another to edit the storyboard.

A marker is an object within a formation that specifies the desired position of a single drone in the formation. A marker may be an empty or non-empty mesh, in which case the position of the mesh (in world coordinates) will be used as the desired position. Non-empty meshes may also contain a dedicated vertex group named Drones. When such a vertex group exists in a non-empty mesh, the positions of all the vertices within the vertex group will be treated as markers instead of the position of the mesh itself. You can read more about markers in the Key concepts chapter.

The LEDs tab is a Skybrush-specific new tab in the sidebar of the 3D Viewport editor that contains panels that allows you to add light animation to your drone show easily.

The Safety & Export tab is a Skybrush-specific new tab in the sidebar of the 3D Viewport editor, containing of two panels: one allows you to perform real-time safety verification of your animation and another to export your drone show in Skybrush Compiled Format (.skyc).

.skyc stands for Skybrush Compiled format. It is our most common show definition file type that contains all information related to a drone show (all drone trajectories and light animations, pyro events, suggested geofence definitions, music, designer notes to the operators etc.). The final output of Skybrush Studio for Blender is always a single .skyc file that can be opened by other components of the Skybrush suite, such as Skybrush Viewer and Skybrush Live.

The storyboard is a simple list of formations (static or dynamic) that are organized in time with proper timing to give you the overall structure of your drone show animation. The storyboard can be edited in the "Formations" tab of the sidebar in the 3D Viewport editor.

The takeoff grid contains the takeoff positions of your drones. It should be your initial formation in your Storyboard. The takeoff grid can be created with the "Create Takeoff Grid" operator, which also initializes all necessary collections for your drone show design.

The templates collection contains all template objects necessary for the drone show. It is currently a single drone template that defines how all drones should look like in Blender. In the vast majority of cases you should not need to modify anything in this collection.