Automating Camera Directing in Fieldscapes

Fieldscapes has the potential to be a very flexible platform when it comes to content creation, and when David was busy recording a video of it a potential use case for the application crossed my mind - would it be possible to direct a video within a Fieldscapes exercise by automating camera positioning? This would allow for a variety of uses, such as exercise flythroughs to video recordings, and that's why I decided to look into the idea for the last Daden U day.

Firstly I had to remind myself about the current capabilities of the cameras before I added any new functionality. I created a new exercise and added a new camera to it. On the camera panel, you can see some of the options we have for setting up the camera - we can rotate horizontally and vertically, as well as adjusting the field of view of the camera. There is the option to change to orthographic projection, but I wasn't going to be needing that.

Camera menu.

The first idea that came to mind was that being able to alter the field of view via PIVOTE actions would be very powerful. That feature isn't currently implemented but I put it on my list of potential improvements. The other idea that popped into my head was the ability to alter individual rotation axes via PIVOTE actions, to allow more subtle control of the camera than is currently available.

Now that I had looked at the camera set up options it was time to remind myself of what PIVOTE can do with the cameras. So I went to edit one of the default system nodes to see the available actions. As
]#u can see from the image below, it is very limited - you can only alter whether or not the camera is active. This would have to change drastically if I was to be able to do what I wanted to.

Old camera actions.

Automating the camera position and movement would require cameras be able to use some of the actions available to props, such as the ability to teleport to, or move to, the position of a prop or the ability to look at a prop within the environment. Some new actions would also nice, such as one to change the field of view as previously mentioned.

To help determine what actions I was needing I decided to choose an existing exercise in Fieldscapes and design a camera 'flythrough' of the exercise in the same way some video games would perform an overview of the level before the user begins. After much deliberation the exercise that I chose to use was the Apollo Explore exercise developed to allow users to walk about the moon and learn about the Apollo 11 moon landing. This exercise has props spread around the environment which makes it easy to define a path we want the camera, or cameras, to follow.

Intended camera positions are circled.

Mapping out the positions I wanted the cameras to be at during the flythrough was the first step I took. I decided on placing two extra cameras in the environment - one to be used to look at the user avatar and one to move around the props. This would give a nice fade to black and back when switching between them. I wanted to slowly pan around the user avatar at the start, followed by the camera showing each of the main pieces of equipment before ending on the lunar lander itself. After this, the exercise would start and the camera would go back to a third person view.

After plotting out all of the positions and directions I wanted the cameras to go to I decided on how I wanted to transition between the positions so that I could determine what actions I would require. As I wanted to smoothly pan the camera at the start around the avatar, the most obvious action I would require is one that would move the camera from one position to another over time. I added 3 actions to the cameras that are present in props that I felt were most useful - MoveTo, TeleportTo, and LookAt. To linearly interpolate from the current camera position to that of the arrow I placed that points to the avatar's head we would use the MoveTo command.

New camera actions.

I set up a timer that would trigger the camera facing the avatar to move to one of the arrows after 1 second had passed, and I would use the same timer to move the camera to other positions after more time had passed. Unfortunately this is where I hit a snag - there was a bug with the way the camera was trying to raycast to the ground when moving between positions, causing it to slowly move upwards into space forever. I ran out of time and had to head home before I managed to find the cause of the issue, so it was at this point where my experiment had to stop for the time being.

In conclusion, I do believe that if the breaking bug I discovered towards the end of the day can be fixed then there is a great chance that the ability to automatically move cameras will be functional within Fieldscapes. I'd also like to develop a PIVOTE action that could transition the field of view of the camera over time - perhaps then we will see a dolly zoom replicated in Fieldscapes!

Oops!