How to use droneshow.store

Quick start

Three steps from a fresh login to a sharable show.

Topics

Uploading shows

Supported formats

The format badge on each show follows the file content, not the extension - a .zip of .path3 files reads as PATH3.

Multi-file uploads

Limits

If a show fails to process

A failed animation gets a red failed badge with a short error message. Common causes: a non-standard MAT field layout, a malformed PATH3 file, a Skybrush CSV with an unexpected header, or a USD scene with no drone geometry. Click Try again to retry - many transient failures clear on a second attempt without re-uploading.

Preparing a Blender (.blend) scene

Drones are detected automatically - any mesh with a roughly-cube bounding box (i.e. sphere-shaped) and fewer than ~1000 vertices is treated as a drone. No special naming required. Larger meshes in the scene (environment, backdrop, hero models) are ignored.

Colour is read with this priority:

1. Object → Viewport Display → Color (animatable, simplest to set up)
2. Material → Emission shader Color input (most common for self-lit LED look)
3. Material → Principled BSDF Base Color
4. Vertex colour (averaged across the mesh)
5. White fallback if none of the above is set

Coordinate convention

Blender uses Z-up / +Y-forward; our renderer uses Y-up with -Z-forward. The bake automatically converts:

• our X = blend X
• our Y = blend Z (Blender's up becomes our up)
• our Z = -blend Y (Blender's forward becomes our -forward)

No project setting needs flipping - chunks land in our coord space directly.

Audio & sync offset

Uploading audio

1. Open the show card.
2. Click Add audio and pick a file.
3. The track auto-attaches; play to confirm.

Supported: .mp3, .wav, .ogg, .oga, .m4a, .aac, .flac. Max 256 MiB - comfortably more than a 5-minute stereo show needs.

Sync offset

After uploading audio you'll see an offset field next to the audio filename. It shifts the music relative to the show - useful when the upload starts a beat too early or too late.

If the audio is silent

Cameras

droneshow.store ships built-in preset cameras (top-down, three-quarter, eye-level) plus two ways to add your own.

Camera JSON format

Minimal valid file - all fields except name are required.

{
  "name": "Hero camera",
  "resolution":      { "x": 1920, "y": 1080 },
  "camera_position": { "tx": 0.0, "ty": 12.0, "tz": 35.0 },
  "camera_rotation": { "rx": -15.0, "ry": 0.0, "rz": 0.0 },
  "focal": 50.0,
  "sensor_width": 41.4214
}

Sharing & comments

Account & data

Keyboard shortcuts

Inside the 3D viewer:

Troubleshooting

Privacy & file retention

We don't keep your original show files. The moment your upload is converted into a streamable playback, the source is removed from the server.

What we keep

• Playback data - quantised positions and colours per frame. This is what the viewer needs to render the show in a browser; it's a tiny fraction of the original file size.
• Audio track (if you attached one) - served back to viewers as-is so the show plays in sync.
• Analytics report - duration, drone count, max speeds and altitudes, the printable PDF. Computed once at upload from the source, then kept alongside the playback data.
• Share preview image - the social-card thumbnail. You can refresh it at any time from the player.
• Project metadata - name, customer, cameras you've imported, your saved views.

What we delete

• Your original upload - .blend, .usd, .mat, .path3 archive, whatever format you sent. Removed automatically after processing finishes.
• Anything bundled INSIDE the upload that wasn't part of the show timeline - your rigs, materials, drivers, constraints, scene comments, layer structure.

What it means in practice

• Re-running analytics on the server requires the original file. If you need fresh metrics later, just re-upload the show into the same project - the old animation can stay or be removed as you prefer.
• You can delete a project (and everything inside it) from the project hub at any time. That removes the playback data, audio, analytics, and share link irreversibly.