Design Cinematic Module

Skaldarnar

Development Lead
Contributor
Art
World
SpecOps
Cinematic Module
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As the one who did the trailers in the past this one is on my wish list for a longer time now. The main goal is to have more control when taking video footage. I'm not sure how much of this is possible or does make sense, but I hope for active participation in a related discussion.

The following list gives a short overview of the main features I would like to see in such a module.
  • Control the player's/camera's movement via way points, speed, acceleration, and total time.
  • Offer an UI for easy changes to graphical settings and shaders.
  • Directly take video footage (similar to screen shots) from the running game.
Ultimately, it should be possible to record nice trailer footage on the one hand, and make cool timelapse videos of building projects on the other hand. For the latter it would be useful to be able to set up multiple cameras, configure them, and start the recording for all of them at the same time.

Related Issues
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Controlled Movement
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I think the first point of the list above should be doable by controlling the player itself, e.g. by setting the start and end point (and other parameters) via console and execute the "movement".

Controls should include the movement direction, viewing direction (yaw/pitch/roll of the camera), and means to control the duration of the movement, i.e. either acceleration/speed controls (e.g. constant speed, linear acceleration, ...) or overall time range.

Interpolation is important for smooth camera movements. In the simple case of a straight movement between two way points the view angles have to be interpolated between start and end. In the more complex case of multiple way points the edgy track should be smoothed into a curve (smoothness of the track should be controllable as well - so many controls :D).


UI for Graphical Settings
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Tweaking graphical settings and shaders just for the time of the movement/record is desirable. Thinking about TeraEd, this was pretty much what I have in mind here - only we would need it in-game.

Some fancy effects could include settings about depth of field and brightness, white balance, color gradient overlays, toning, cell shading, ... Some of these effects can surely be done in post-processing (e.g. white balance and color adjustments), but for others direct control would be great.


Video Capture
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The points above are enough for taking great video footage user 3rd party tools (e.g. Fraps). However, it would be awesome to allow for taking video captures right in the game - similar to screenshots. The player should be able to select a fixed framerate for the recording.


Multiple Cameras
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In addition to the points above the use of multiple cameras should be supported. That way, the player can set up different cameras, configure them, and start them to record a specific scene. Advanced options could include triggering video captures based on the player's position, action plates, ...

Not sure if this last point makes any sense: Let "headless clients" connect to a specific camera entity on a server. If the video capture is started for this specific camera the client is responsible for capturing the scene. This might be useful to capture videos from different angles with a not-so-beefy PC using your laptop as recording device, for instance.
 

Cervator

Org Co-Founder & Project Lead
Contributor
Design
Logistics
SpecOps
Good stuff! One neat addition: Allowing the use of these in-game camera tools for in-game purposes - as in, monitors hooked up to "security cameras" although these probably would need some serious optimization (like low fps) to not kill overall performance. Waypoints could also be used for other reasons and may actually already exist in Pathfinding (ref: ancient closed issue #75)

Also reminds me slightly of #583 for Light & Shadow's command map, which might almost be like a minimap on a table, or AWT mode in a block
 
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