Tutorial: Camera basics This tutorial walks you through the steps to learn camera basics in Lumberyard, including creating a first person camera, a third person camera, and tracking and dynamic zooming. At the end of the tutorial you will know the basics of how game cameras work. You will learn how to do the following: Create a camera following object Setup the first person camera view Setup the third person shoulder camera view Setup tracking and dynamic zoom Prerequisites You must have completed the following before starting this tutorial: Introduction to Flow Graph Adding triggers and volumes Using movers Input controls and debugging Step 1: Create the camera s following object The first step in the tutorial is to create a camera s following object, which is the Mover_Capsule. The idea is to parent the camera to the Mover_Capsule, then the camera will always follow the Mover_Capsule to create desired camera views. To create a mover capsule 1. In Lumberyard Editor, open Camera_Sample.cry level, and locate the Rabbit object in the level. Rabbit is the object the camera will be following so you can get smooth camera movement while you make a turn.
2. Locate the Mover_Capsule in the Flow Graph Window. To create a Flow Graph within object, just select the object and right-click to create it. In this case, we are looking at a Flow Graph that was previously created. There are three important Flow Graph nodes: a. Entity:GetPos to get position of object, in this case the object is Rabbit b. Movement:MoveEnityTo to make Mover_Capsule move in the direction of Rabbit at a set speed. c. Entity: EntityFaceAt to make sure the capsule always faces the rabbit. The FwdDir is set to Y- in this case. You have now setup a camera s following object and are ready for camera setup.
Step 2: Setup the first person camera view After creating the camera s following object, you will learn how to setup the first person point of view (POV). There is no Flow Graph required once you have setup the camera view action in the start Flow Graph, then parent the camera to the Mover_Capsule, and finally setup the camera position to the desired location. To setup Camera:View 1. Locate the 00_Start Flow Graph in Flow Graph Editor. 2. Select the first Camera:View node in Flow Graph that is connected to the output from the Logid:Sequencer.
3. You can see the 01_Camera_Parented_to_Mover3 camera is associated with Camera:View node. This is the only thing you will need to set user up for viewing level from the camera you have. 4. Setup Camera:View with a Sequencer so you can cycle through different camera views. 5. Jump into the game, or turn AI/Physics on to preview the camera animation and switch the camera to 01_Camera_Parented_to_Mover3 to view from the camera. Go back to the default camera and adjust the position of the camera. It will need to be eye level since the capsule represents a character model. Now you know how to setup a first person camera. Step 3: Setup the Third Person shoulder camera view Now that you ve learned how to setup a first person view, the last thing you will learn in this tutorial is to parent the camera to the capsule mover and adjust camera position to get the third person view that is over the shoulder. To create the third person shoulder POV 1. Create a Tag point > Tagpoint2. 2. Use the link function to parent 03_Camera_Parented_to_LookTarget to the Tagpoint2
3. Create Movement:RotateEntityTo nodes in Flow Graph Editor to make 03_Camera_Parented_to_LookTarget rotate and move up and down based on Tagpoint2 to create shoulder camera movements. Congratulations! You have successfully created a third person over the shoulder camera view.
Step 4: Create tracking and dynamic zoom Tracking is one of main actions when working with cameras. In this step, we will walk you through how to setup tracking and give user dynamic zoom experiences. We will use the 07_Tracking + Dynamic_Zoom to guide you through the process. To create a tracking view 1. Make the camera track the target by adding an Entity:EntityFaceAt node to setup the target facing camera. 2. Set an offset to create tracking distance. Create Add math nodes to apply an offset from X, Y, Z vectors nodes. To create Dynamic Zoom 1. Now we will change the camera FOV dynamically based on the distance between the camera and the entity it is tracking.
2. Get the position after game start by using a Time:Delay node. 3. Return dynamic values for the camera s FOV from smoothing out the multiplier and clamping the value from a defined range. After creating tracking offset and changing FOV for the camera, you have now created a tracking camera view with dynamic zoom. Conclusion This concludes the Flow Graph tutorial series for Lumberyard. Using this set of tutorials, you have begun to understand the power of scripting in the Lumberyard Editor. When you are comfortable with the basics of Flow Graph, browse our tutorial pages to learn even more about Lumberyard's advanced tools and features. There are thousands of games to be made! We d love to hear from you! Head to our Tutorial Discussion forum to share any feedback you have, including what you do or don t like about our tutorials or new content you d like to see in the near future.