Follow the Leader

Well, I'm back from break, and you know what that means, right?! Right? Hello? You're going to have to yell louder at your computer screen—I can barely hear you.

What it means is that it's time for more updates. The major thing that I've been working on is getting camera navigation to work well in complex environments, because cutting to different angles won't matter much if the individual shots are incoherent. To work this stuff out, I built a sort of pachinko machine for a ball to roll down. I also gave it walls and a ceiling, to force the camera to track the ball between the pins—no cheating with shots from the outside, like I was doing with the last ball rolling down a hill. Here's the view from the top of the slope:

The first problem became clear right away: the camera was cutting to a position above the entire thing, unable to figure out how to get inside. Here's a shot of the red camera getting a spectacular view of... a gray ceiling.

This is a major issue: even if tracking is working fine, if the initial choice of camera angle is poor, the entire shot will be messed up. I didn't want to just have the initial shot be some offset from the target, because the camera could end up inside another object, or the target could become occluded. It also wouldn't make sense to try and just find a position for the camera where the target is visible, because there are infinite shot choices.

For now, I ended up having the camera start at the position of the target, making the camera into a rigid body, and adding a force to push it off in one direction to determine it's initial position (before it starts following the target). That way, the camera can't end up inside another object, because it will bounce off anything it hits; the target should also start out unoccluded, since the camera started at the target's position. I'm trying to figure out how to handle the collisions exactly, since right now the camera is capable of bouncing other objects away too, which is not good. But for now, this works for determining an initial position.

Now the camera is at least starting inside the pachinko machine, so that's good! It has it's own collision detection, so it won't go through the pegs while using a tweaked version of the SmoothFollow script in Unity to follow the ball. However, while it continues to keep the ball in the center of its sights, it sometimes circles all the way around it, which gets really dizzying. Having the ball locked into the center of its view is also really jarring, especially when the ball makes sudden stops. Here's the camera shooting the ball from the wrong side:

What I ended up doing was adding a way to change which side of the target the camera should be tracking on: you can track from behind, from the side, from the front (so the camera is moving backwards), or any angle in between. I pretty much redid most of the follow script too, so that the camera is more free to avoid obstacles, while constantly trying to get back to a certain position with respect to the ball (in front, behind, etc). It's sort of working like the 180 degree rule, where the camera just stays on one side of the ball, and will only rotate around to the other side if the ball reverses direction. Here's a shot of the camera slaloming through the pegs to follow the ball:

I also tested out multiple cameras on the same object (which probably wouldn't really happen, since one camera would just be cutting between these 3 different angles). Here's the usual Ball Rolling Down A Hill, but with 3 cameras tracking along it—one behind, one in front, and one on the side. The reason that the blue camera is at more of an angle is because it was tracking behind, and had to spin around once the ball hit the wall. I'm working on getting the cameras to get closer and further from their targets as well, since that will help to avoid collisions while keeping them in view.

(Sorry for all the screenshots: I actually just discovered that my Camtasia trial version expired, so I'm going to figure out a new way to make videos.)

Anyway! Next week, it's behavior tree time: since the cameras are decent at handling single shots (though obviously I'm going to continue fine-tuning), I'm going to get them cutting between different angles. To get started with behavior trees, I'm going to make it very simple—It will probably just be things like cutting between establishing shots, tracking shots, and close-ups. But it will give me something to build off of.

~ Fin ~