Multi Camera Animation Pipeline

[Zombie]

Hey guys,

When animating several cameras for a cutscene, what is the best way to do it?

Normally in other engines I would use multiple cameras on the on the last frame of a camera, I would cut to another camera and so on, usually with the help of a camera switcher.

Now for MD5 do I export each camera individually or do you export multiple cameras at once?  Or something completely different?

Feel free to tell me something different too, open to the best way to manage cameras and how to trigger them in game etc.

Thanks guys!

Z

[Zombie]

I was looking at the pinky cinematic, how do you define cuts?

numFrames 436
frameRate 24
numCuts 5

cuts {
   96
   148
   198
   290
   324
}

[The Happy Friar]

I forget exactly, but I want to say that you can use one camera and the "cut" frames are to tell the engine not to interpolate to the next frame but to jump.

[Zombie]

Interesting, I'll try putting in a cut where I have changed the camera position drastically in the next frame.

I did try it without cuts and the camera did move to each hard angle change without any side affects though.

[oneofthe8devilz]

Some notes about this topic that I wrote down while working with camera cuts that I recently found on my HDD that survived the Doom3World meltdown...

As usual use at your own risk...

Additional Export Notes
=================

1. In order to have your model's bounding-boxes correctly calculated when
   in camera mode make sure to add a key "cinematic" with the value "1" to
   your mesh-entity in the doom³ editor.

2. Cuts with 1 Camera in 3dsmax: Let's say your animation is 91 (from 0-90)
   Frames long and you want to have 2 Scenes with 1 cut at Frame 44 to 45.
   Make sure you have set a key for each Transformation at Frame 44... (this
   includes Position, Rotation and FOV) before you move the camera to the
   second scene on the next Frame (45) and start working on your second scene.

3. MD5Camera Cut Definition between two Scenes: It is always the last Frame of
   the First Scene (NOT the first Frame of the second Scene)
   
4. NumCut Hint: Don't count the last Frame of the last scene of your animation
   as a cut, since there is no scene following and therefore it's not a cut.