#Camera ownership. Switching from first person to cutscenes

15 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

deep forge
#

In my first person game the camera switches between the player's perspective and showing cutscenes further ahead/back in the level.

This makes me think that the camera should not be "owned" by the player, but by the game as a whole, leading me to not having the camera as a child of the player node, but rather the root. But how would I go about making the camera move back and act as the player's perspective after a cutscene has completed?

Do I change the camera's parent depending on what's being shown? Do I toggle top_level back and forth? Do I update the camera's transform every frame? I saw the RemoteTransform Node, but the relationship seems inverted to what I'd want.

Any suggestions are welcome, thanks!

spark herald
#

One thought is you can have maybe a "camera arm" following the player with nothing attached to it, and a cutscene spot. Your arm is just two node3ds, one centered on the player and one some distance away. Jump cuts should be no problem, reparent, then just lerp position if you want like smooth fade in/ out.

#

I'm not big on 3d but those are my thoughts

deep forge
#

So reparenting is not that bad of an idea then? Seems like I've been reading that reparenting is generally not advisable for performance reasons

spark herald
#

Not sure on that but yeah you can just have it snap/lerp to a few Node3Ds that basically serve as "camera slots"

deep forge
#

And the "snapping" would entail simply updating the Transform each frame?

#

I mean, I know lerping for camera movement is common enough, and just updating the transform each frame should work just as well

spark herald
#

I mean if you want to do a jump cut then you just want your camera to copy the position/rotation of the spot, one-and-done update and not per frame

#

Depends on what shots you want

humble rapids
#

You can have multiple cameras in the scene for this

#

You just need to set the current property to true on one for it to render to the viewport

deep forge
#

Maybe I'll try both and see which one I like better

#

I guess the player won't notice the difference

#

It's supposed to be a seamless and smooth transition

#

Thanks for the help so far!