Cinematic Swooping Camera

Ever want to do an exciting swooping camera like they do in Grid? Don't be ashamed -- I've always wanted to. We've created and released some code that'll do just that (download this at www.dejobaan.net/3DGS/camera_swoop.zip). Are there others? Maybe. I don't know. We tossed in some nice cubes with a modified version of the FFP cubemap shader for fun. This was done with A6, since we're still using that with our production code.

Wow, thanks Ichiro! You're the man.
Not to forget the other Dejobaan people. You're all awesome. I mean.. AWESOME.

Now. Let me have a look at it..

hi ichiro , i live in massachusetts too, i live in holden are you near there? and your camera sounds very cool but havent seen it yet

Very handy indeed, this will be quite salutary for a plausible camera motion during cut scenes

Cheers

Frazzle

That's a very nice piece of code! Thanks a lot!

Thanks Ichiro, defently come in handy..

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=e...e=UTF8&z=10

Thanks Ichiro this is really nice code!

May I ask what determines the direction the camera swoops along the cos curve?

If you're asking what determines the shape of the arc, it's the skill_px (and _py and _pz) values. Here's a prototype I did in Processing (takes a moment to load) -- the target is shown in blue, and has _px and _py values equal (1.0). The camera is shown in orange, and has a _px of (I believe) 2.0 and a _py of 1.0, which means that the camera will approach its target more quickly.

If that all make sense. It's late.

Thanks Ichiro that makes sense! Have you thought about getting the camera to move along a benzier curve? Or isn't that really needed as the motion feels like that because of the way the target point moves.

Great work!! I love it!

Very nice piece of code, thanks for the contribution.

Nice code I like it,and I like the shader to..

I converted it to lite-c and made the code much smaller without using entitys:
Download
I hope it is okay like that...

Neat!

@Puppeter:
That's awesome, thanks!

Still looking great, very nice!

What I'd be interested in is if it was "truly" 3 dimensional (sorry for the "truly, it makes it sound bad, which it isn't, but I can't think of a better word). What I mean is that I don't see the camera in the code go beyond a tilt of 90 degrees... which I always found to be the hard part in coding cameras.

You mean something like instead of rotating 180° pan when tilt is about to get higher then 90°, keep on tilting and then roll over or something like that?

I was planning to add the possibility to create camera paths with more than 2 points, so you can create smooth pathways around corners etc.