Cinematic Editor: Devlog#5

[mathiasj]

@mathiasj

As there is no release of the Cinematic Editor of GSoC and it looks like it is not maintained anymore, I decided to start work on an own version.
The concept is a bit different though: The user can define a cinematic with a new file format and preview it in real time. I plan to add several utilities to the real time preview such as adding WayPoints etc. to ease the creation process. It is not a fully fledged GUI editor but good enough to make the cinematic creation progress faster.

This is what the GUI looks like currently:

http://i.imgur.com/WydDW9s.png

This is a sample cinematic file:

Scene rootNode
Timeline {
0: camera location -2.06 7.63 12.82 //set camera location (vector) after 0 seconds
0: camera follow Cube 2 //follow the spatial Cube for 2 seconds
0: event MotionEvent Cube { //launch this eventafter 0 seconds
WayPoint 0 0.5 0
WayPoint 10 0.5 0
LoopMode DontLoop
Duration 2
}
3: camera follow Cube 2
3: event MotionEvent camera { //launch this event after 3 seconds
WayPoint -2.06 7.63 12.82
WayPoint 16 21 -12
LoopMode DontLoop
Duration 2
}
}
Duration 5
LoopMode Loop
Speed 1

I plan to include a couple of new CinematicEvents and the User should be able to extend the file parser to include further custom events. Let’s see where this will end up… If it’ll be usable, I could also integrate it with the SDK by creating a plugin that adds a new button to the toolbar that launches the editor. There you could search for local cinematic files and edit them / create new ones.

As I said in that thread, I started work on an own CinematicEditor. It will not be as advanced as the one that was planned here but I hope to make it kind of usable. I just have a lot of stuff going on in school and private right now so development is a bit slow, but I will pick it up again in about a week when I will finally have finished that essay that I’ve been writing for half a year…