Extensive cutscene/movie making

[Metal96]

Yes, I understand the title is a bit weird. Anyway,

Hi all,
This may sound strange, but I just want some tips/help on a bit of... different... SRB2 editing. Anyway, I want to make a music video for one of my newly released songs (download it here! "Kingdom," track 4 on the Sands of Time EP) using SRB2. This is because I don't really have anything better to do animation with that I know how to use and I think the result might be rather cool. Do my own style of CG animation... Anyway, what I would do is find a video editor that can chroma-key out the background, dynamically shrink the size so I am 128 pixels tall in the video, and then "resample" it to 15fps and export each frame as a PNG. These would be imported into SLumpEd and saved in a wad with object info. What I want to know, however, is how to:

1. Create a camera object that will always face my object and follow zoom tube waypoints for some nice dynamic camera
2. Make this object also face me when in the air (make the object also change vertical angle)
3. Make an object that will use mulitple freeslots for continuous "video" playback
4. Some math that will let me easily find out how to waypoint this camera to match the movements of my camera
5. I may think of something else...

So that's about it. Please give comments/suggestions. I'll post the final thing here when it's done.

 

[Prime 2.0]

A lot of the jargon here flew over my head, but I can tell you this much: SRB2's camera control is very basic, and doesn't easily allow for scripted movements. The cutaway view linedef can be used to set specific stationary views away from the player, and various console commands(cam_rotate, cam_dist, cam_height, cam_speed, cam_still) can be used to change how the camera faces and chases the player, but I doubt that's sufficient for your needs here.

The best idea I can think of for what you seem to want is that if you made a character wad that had invisible sprites(all cyan, that is) and a zoom tube with roughly the course you want the camera to move through, you could send yourself through the zoom tube and use a camera script to keep the camera in the right position/angle relative to yourself and act as a camera yourself, so to speak.

...of course, if it's a player you're filming, that would mean you'd need someone to cooperate with.

 

[Metal96]

I understand what you're saying. Do you think it may be easier to just call a_faceplayer (or whatever it's called, I'll find out) every tick?