Camtrace Scripted Camera Guide

Camtrace 3D Scripted Camera Guide

This is a quick step-by-step guide on how to create a scripted camera using Camtrace3D and MovieMod, recently released by Ultraviolet Productions. This guide contains the basics you need to know to get a simple camera up and running, CT3D contains some excellent extras for ET:QW, such as the jitter function for depth of field, locking the camera on a player and an exec at time function. For this guide you will need to download Camtrace3D and MovieMod, install Camtrace3D to your desired location and extract MovieMod to your main install base folder.

First thing to do is load up Camtrace3D. Click the <game> tab, hit Mod and select ET:QW. Next go to <game> tab again and then preferences. <Game_type> should be set to ET:QW, <exe_path> should be the location of your etqw.exe, and <base_directory> should be the location of your userpath base folder. By default this is located in C:\Documents and Settings\user\my documents\id Software\base, I prefer to have my userpath on my larger hard drive, so my location is G:\games\etqwstuff\base, this is done by adding +set fs_userpath “G:\games\etqwstuff” to my game shortcut command line. <record_key> is the key you will use to set a camera position point, <reinitialisation_key> is the key that will reset all your points back to nothing. You can change these to anything you like, default is 8 and 0 respectively. Hit apply then ok and we’re ready to go.

Load up ET:QW with MovieMod running and load your demo. Once loaded set demo_noclip 1 so you can free fly around the map while the demo plays, once you’re at the point where you want to start your camera, use the pausenetdemo command to freeze the demo. Move your camera into position and press 8, this will capture your 1st point. Use pausenetdemo again to start the playback until you get to your next point, pause the demo and reposition your camera, press 8 again to capture your 2nd point. Repeat this process until your whole camera path has been created for the scene you want to capture. It’s not necessary to pause the demo to set your points, it just makes it easier to line up the camera. Close down ETQW and load up Camtrace3D again.

Go to the Calcul tab and click on the Import button. We need to now import all the positions you just saved, these are .qwcp files. By default these will be saved to C:\Documents and Settings\user\my documents\id Software\moviemod\cameras\ct3d\pos, since I have a manually specified userpath, mine are located G:/etqwstuff/moviemod/cameras/ct3d/pos. Browse to your pos folder and hit OK, you should now see your curves loaded into Camtrace3D. Since ET:QW doesn’t use .bsp files for its maps, we won’t be able to see the map wireframe to tweak the camera path, so at this point it’s a case of trial and error until you’re happy with your cam. In the Script tab put a tick in <auto_start>, this means the camera will play back at proper time you set in the demo instead of as soon as you exec the cam bind.

In the Script tab again, make sure Camera Mode dropdown is set to Free then click on Create, this will now allow you to save your camera ready to be used in game. The mod needs to exec all the files within a folder, so in your cameras folder create a new folder with the name of your choice. For this setup I created a folder called mycam1 in the cameras folder located in MovieMod, location being G:\games\etqwstuff\moviemod\cameras\mycam1. So hit Create and save to this location. We now need to create binds that will allow us to run the camera when playing back the demo, freecam mode has to be turned on before the camera will run, so I created 2 binds.

bind 1 "freecam"
bind 2 "cam mycam1"

Again when you’re creating your cam bind, you tell it to exec the folder name. Now when you play the demo again, hit your 2 binds. Because we have <auto_start> selected when we created your camera, you will see your cam in action at the moment you specified in the demo when capturing the points.

For capturing your new cam sequence, we’ll just use the standard rendernetdemo command. When Camtrace3D sets it’s exec_at_time command to tell the camera when to start playing, this value is a frame amount, the rendernetdemo command uses a time in ms. You will have to get this time yourself for capturing, load your demo and go to the point you want to start capturing from and pause the demo, load up the demo hud (g_showdemohud 1) and the time should be displayed in ms, use this as your start time. Within Camtrace3D at the right hand side is a white box where you 1st imported your capture points. The value to the left of the eye is the length of time your camera sequence is, convert this time to ms by multiplying by 1000 and add it to your start time, this will now give you stop time for capturing. It would be best to add a couple of secs to give a little leeway.

Once you start your rendernetdemo, hit your 2 binds straight away to initiate your camera and sit back and watch it capture and that should be it!

Thx to Darkangel for this Tutorial.