Game Dev in Progress… Day 19
Hello and welcome to another exciting week. Today I made some pretty good progress through the Stealth Game & Cinematography Course. I was able to complete the environmental set up learn how to apply material to game objects as well as how lighting works in a game environment. Below is an image of the section that I was able to learn and play around with:
The columns, windows, and walls were practice dummies where I learned how to create materials and apply them to objects. As you can see there are 2 of the same type of object, one them was already completed for me. My job was to replicate that finished job to practice getting the hang of applying materials. I also learned about environmental lighting using the display case shown and as well as creating skyboxes.
After finishing this section, I was able to move on an finish creating my first in game cutscene. This cutscene I needed to make was the intro cutscene to the stealth game. The section gave me rundown on how to use Timelines and Cinemachine to create fluid in game cutscenes. Timeline is a tool that is built into Unity that allows developers to create cinematics, game-play, particle effects, game-play sequences, and audio sequences. Cinemachine is a tool that can be added into Unity that allows the ability to create virtual cameras and control them. It’s just an easier way to create cameras without having to develop logic to manipulate them yourself. These tools are really powerful and are very easy to use. I was able to complete my first cutscene today and you can view it below:
This entire cutscene was done by using both Timeline to time cuts between the scenes and Cinemachine to create two virtual cameras for the two scenes. The panning of the camera was all done just by using the Timeline to record the movement of the camera from one position to the other. The switching of camera was done also through Timeline just by cutting and dragging how much time you wanted the animation to play. It was very simple to create and even an amateur like me who has no knowledge about cinematography can do something like this.
Lastly, I was able to get through some of the game over cutscene section and just learned how to use a Dolly Camera. Not only can use Cinemachine to create regular cameras but you can also use Dolly Cameras. These cameras are used extensively in film making. Its essentially a camera placed on a track and allows the fluid movement of the camera to create different scene angles that otherwise is hard to create. Here is a preview of what I was able to accomplish with it:
As you can see, the camera moving around the security guard was made using the dolly camera and without it is probably be more difficult then it should be.
Overall, there was a lot different uses of Cinemachine and Timeline. I hope to learn more about the different techniques and uses of both in future sections within the course. This section and the last sections touched a bit on scene composition and hopefully I’ll get to learn more about that as well. As a person who doesn’t have any background in cinematography, this has been enlightening day.
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Cristian Aspacio
