Set up a camera track

Reviewed

A camera track is up to eight waypoints stamped from wherever you are standing, plus the curve the flight takes between them.

In the menus: ESC → Design → Camera

The panel's three bands are 1. TRACK, 2. WAYPOINTS and 3. PLAYBACK.

This page covers the first two.

Play a camera track and Hold a fixed shot own the third.

Track picks which of the eight you are working on. The eight are one shared set for the whole server.

Tracks with waypoints appear yellow in the selector.

Press NICKNAME to give the track a name you can use in commands instead of its number.

Placing waypoints in the world

Select PLACE WAYPOINTS IN WORLD. You are dropped back into the world in FRAMING mode. Controls are printed along the bottom of the screen.

  1. Fly to the shot and look at what it should see.
  2. Set the dials: Dwell (0 to 30 seconds), FOV (5 to 160), and the three lens values Rack focus and blur a shot covers.
  3. Capture. In first person, the shot records your eye position and view angles. In third person, it records the shoulder-camera view on screen.
  4. Repeat, then exit with MOUSE2. R undoes your latest placement. Before you capture a shot, it can also undo something you placed before entering this mode.

Press E/Q to select a saved shot and restore its framing and lens settings.

Press Backspace to clear it.

Choosing the curve and the holds

Pick a Spline for the whole track.

  • Standard passes through every waypoint.
  • Smooth rounds the corners off.
  • Straight flies each leg as a straight line and takes the corner at the waypoint.

Dwell is a pause on one waypoint, and it stretches the shot rather than eating into it. A 10-second track with two 3-second holds runs for 16 seconds.

To make a travelling camera turn towards a moving character, keep a subject framed.

Prefer the console?

/camera on its own prints the help block. add, clear, path and the playback verbs fall back to your active track when you leave the track argument out.

Give a track a nickname:

Then /camera play intro 10 plays the named track. Use none as the name to remove its nickname.

A bare - skips a position. at <mark> takes the shot from a saved placemark instead of from where you stand.

/camera clear [track] empties a track. /camera list prints a header per track and a row per waypoint. /camera view <track> <n> glides you alone to one waypoint to check its framing. Run it again on the same waypoint, or use /camera view off, to return.