I was wondering if there is some way to save a particular camera view/angle so that I could play it at a specific keyframe using switches or actions or something? In other words say I have created a street scene and on a certain frame I want to zoom into a door, zoom into a characters face in another and so on. I know I can go to a frame and drag the camera which animates it but what if I want to do that sudden "uh oh!" jump to a characters face? I was thinking that if there might be some way of setting a specific camera position
ie
Store Front Zoom
Main Street
View From Roof
etc
and then use something like a switch file to instantly place the camera (without the animation of it moving) at that predefined location/position?
I haven't gotten a good grasp on cameras yet so forgive me if this is a boneheaded question or I am missing the obvious.
[Edit: I guess I may be having just an error in perception, meaning maybe I should be placing those shots as layers and unhiding and then hiding them. Or maybe I should be editing the frames later in another product to add those frames and title and credits. Anyhow your input welcome as I am as green as they come right now.
I've done a few bits where I've done things with the camera to make it look like separate shots. The key is to set a keyframe for all the camera attributes at the last frame of the "shot", and set the keyframe type to "Step". Then on the next frame move your camera to wherever you want the new "shot" to start from. The camera will move directly between the 2 different positions.
It's not a recallable camera state, but it should do the trick. I'm also pretty sure that it would be possible to write a script to store a "shot list". I'll think a bit on that, not sure if it would be worth it.
I'm not at my computer so I can't try it right now, but the idea of doing it with actions sounds pretty promising
--Brian
Thanks Brian, will try this tomorrow after work. I toyed with the idea of setting these unique shots as keyframes beyond the end frame and then using a switch file to jump to those frames and then jump back but I just don't know enough yet -not even sure if that is possible or a good/bad idea.
Anyway I'll keep an eye out for any of your experiments. I'm going to have a go at it the way you suggested -thanks a lot.
[OT: Not that you asked but after you mentioned you wouldn't mind others jumping in with the scripting I took a run of several hours at Lua but had to put on the brakes. I have a well known tendency to gallop off on tangents and am forcing myself to focus on Moho basics. I will be taking some online programming courses beginning Feb 2005 at gameversity.com and once I get my feet wet I will hit Lua and CScript/C for 3D Game Studio with both feet as I have several ideas I've had bouncing around the brain pan for several years.]
