Getting Started with Flyby
Cameras
by Uvavoo
These are the OCB settings available for flyby cameras.
To Create a Simple Flyby Camera Sequence
1. From the effects menu select flyby camera and place it in
your scene. You will notice the small ‘cone’ in front of the
camera showing which direction it is pointing in. You can
change the direction by holding the alt key down and using
the cursor keys. Holding the Alt + Shift keys increases the
increment the camera turns.
2. Select this camera and click on ‘O’ to get the OCB window
up (see Fig 1).
Fig 2. Simple flyby sequence
In the OCB settings chart above I have highlighted in red
the buttons which are pressed for most flyby sequences. They
need only be pressed for the FIRST camera in the sequence.
3. You now need to enter the sequence number. You may have
up to 7 sequences in one level.
4. Enter the camera number. Each camera in the sequence must
increment by 1.
5. Leave the other settings as the defaults for now.
6. The next step is to add your other cameras. Refer to Fig
2 to complete your simple flyby sequence.
To trigger your flyby, you simply trigger the first camera
in the sequence.
Fig 3. Trigger set up
In the trigger type window make sure the trigger is set to
CAMERA. Don’t forget to click the ONE SHOT button to prevent
the sequence from looping.
Ok Spielberg, test it out in game and check out your flyby.
FLYBY CAMERAS – some more advanced techniques
I have repeated the ocb table here for convenience.
First we are going to deal with the other OCB settings,
namely Speed, Roll and FOV.
Speed
The higher the number, the faster the speed. Sounds obvious,
but it is not as simple as it sounds. Personally I never
change the speed. Because the game engine uses the distance
between the cameras to interpret the speed (in a linear
fashion) I use this to change the speed of the camera and do
not further complicate things by changing the speed in the
OCB. See fig 4.
Fig 4. Changing the speed of the camera by changing the
distance between the cameras rather than using the speed
setting in the OCB. In this sequence the camera will start
off slowly and increase speed towards the end.
Roll
This is quite a nice feature. Enter the number in the roll
field (degrees) and the camera will roll (bank) by that
amount. Nice to bank the camera when going round corners for
example.
FOV
Field of view. A higher number in here causes the field of
view to increase, like widening the angle of the lens.
* All the above OCB’s need to be applied to the camera it
relates to.
Heavy Trigger
The flyby camera can trigger a heavy trigger. Simply open
the OCB on the camera you wish to trigger the heavy trigger
and click on the 14 button (activate heavy trigger). Place a
heavy trigger under this camera to trigger, say, a door
opening. A whole sequence of events can be triggered this
way, rather like the ‘rolling ball’ trick.
Cut Cams
This is a very elegant and much underused feature in the
level editor mainly because of the difficulties in getting
it to work properly. I have found that by using ‘dummy’
cameras this technique works every time. Basically what a
cut cam does is jump to another camera in the sequence. This
can be done many times in one sequence and you can cut
between rooms if you wish. This is the technique I use.
Fig 2
In this example the camera will ‘Cut’ between 3 different
rooms (doesn’t have to be different rooms can be all in the
same room). The blue
cameras are the cutcams, the
yellow cameras are the cameras the cutcam jumps to,
and the magenta are the
dummy cameras. To set up this sequence proceed as follows.
1. Set up your camera sequene in the usual way. 2. Click on
Camera 2 and open its OCB, click on the grey 7 button in the
timer filed enter the number 4, because you want the camera
to jump to this camera. Repeat the operation with camera 6,
typing 8 in the timer field. When in game the camera will
smoothly fly between camera 0 and 2 then cut to camera 4,
smoothly fly to camera 6 then cut again to camera 8 and
finally smoothly fly on to the end, camera 11.
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