I don’t think this is possible, but I thought I throw the question out there…Is there some way to make a cutscene with a moving camera? I thought it would have been really cool to have a camera sweep in the beginning of the module I’m working on now.
Can you get it to follow something that’s invisible ?
How would I get the camera to follow you mean?
I’ve heard it’s possible to do that, although I haven’t seen it demonstrated.
Oh…that sounds interesting. I think I’ll try and ask at Discord too.
yes it’s very possible. Use invisible creatures as ‘camera trackers’ for tracking and/or panning …
Well, I would need the camera to fly down from up on high so I believe it would be quite hard to do that with following a creature. That would require some nightmare with constructing walkmeshes (hate that thing) and I just recently did (again) a simple thing with making a bed walkable with a ramp up to it. Even that is somehow hard in the toolset to make them line up with those walkmesh helpers.
I think I’ll give up on this thing since I’m quite satisfied with the intro of my module now (it was there I initially wanted a flying and zooming camera).
a flying camera/tracker? yeah thats not so easy :\
Does either the Gestalt Cutscene Scripting System or the earlier Gestalt Camera Scripting System v2.0 work in NwN 2? If not, is there an equivalent for NwN 2?
If it does work, then it is comparatively easy to achieve the camera flying/following that you want.
TR
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i haven’t looked at those, but the camera system is quite (very) different than NwN. A long time ago I made an extensive cutscene in NwN and many years later looked into doing something like it in NwN2 … here’s the rub: the functions work IFF the player is currently using the Exploration mode camera, but there’s no guarantee that he is (NwN2 has three camera modes: Exploration (focus on PC), Strategy (topdown panning around), and Chase (behind the back). And i never found a function that even allows a check for player’s current camera mode, let alone changing it.
So NwN2 has advanced camera usage in dialogs … static camera-objects can be placed in an Area and ‘invoked’ for any dialog node, as well as there being several preset types of views of the node’s speaker. Panning and tracking is generally done by setting an invisible creature as the ‘speaker’ and focusing a camera on it – the creature is given ActionMoveToObject() commands, where object is a preplaced waypoint …
but it’s been a long time and if anyone is serious they should at least browse those Gestalt systems (have heard good things about them)
These have never worked when I’ve tried them.
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The camera does track invisible creatures, I was using one in a new area yesterday for that very purpose (I wanted the camera to track the invisible PC, as the focus was on the companions moving to a spot I placed the PC, to show them arriving at that location)
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Well, it still doesn’t help since I need to build walkmeshes high above the ground…
Not sure I understand what you are trying to achieve, since for me it does work. I built a starwars area with a High Taris and a lower Taris and the camera just follows my pc in exploration mode whether I am on the High walk meshes or at the base. So if your plan was to use the invisible character to control the camera that would work.
I could see somebody creating a sophisticated animation for an invisible creature in order to change the camera height. But that would probably be a single use animation.
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at a guess, camera height (focused on an invis creature) might be determined by Appearance.2da “HEIGHT” – so maybe just create a custom appearance row and set its HEIGHT to a higher val … (?)
or just choose a bigger creature and set it scripthidden* … in my tests it tracked, but if it is assigned dialog nodes they do not speak them …
* keep AI enabled
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Or… Just make a movie tracking the invisible creature and zoom in and out. The original idea was for at the beginning of the module and that should be an easy place to put a movie.
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Thanks for keeping this topic alive, I guess. I have, however, moved on and won’t be doing this anyway.
Maybe…just maybe…when I have finished everything else with this module (and I won’t finish it in another 6 months, I believe, since it’s become quite big, and the making of it has been way more unstructured and chaotic than my 4 previous modules) I might come back to this and consider it again. We’ll see what happens.
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Looks like binding camera to invisible creature is only option. I’ve tried to bind camera to animated placeable, but it was no go.
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It’s probably binding to an attachment point on the creature. ‘ap_camera’ perhaps?