SpellForce 2 Editor: How do you make cutscenes?

[Wormic]

I'm trying to learn how to make cutscenes using the SF2 editor but I'm having a hard time with it.

If anyone has any tips on how that part of the editor works, I'd appreciate them a lot!

[Bapt890]

Hi !

First I'll explain how cutscenes works :
Cutscenes have multiple takes, each take being basically a path that the camera and its target will follow. The take is a tak file.
To make the path of the take, the camera position and the target position are set with keyframes to progressively move them.


To make a take :

• Go to the Cutscene Edit tool (C)

• Insert take - Create your take. Phenomic named them as follow : cs_XX_takeYY, where XX is the cutscene id and YY the take id.

• Now you should think of your take : Will it be static ? Move along path ? Jump from place to place ? I suggest to immediatly set to, respectively, Fixed Position, Interpolated or JumpCut before doing anything else or it might not work.

• After that, you can add keyframes. To do so, double click on the first row of the grid-like thing on the right. It will add a camera pos and a target pos exactly how your camera in the editor is currently, position and rotation included, so I suggest to place your camera accordingly before adding one. Don't worry, you can still edit the position by changing its coordinate by selecting it.

• Place as many as you want, and hit play to see if you like it.

• Then, you can save it. A folder with your map name will be created, with a Camera folder inside, with your take(s) in it.

To use your take in a cutscene, I suggest you to look into the scripts of other maps to see how they manage cutscenes. It is commonly in a script that begins with cs_. But basically, you can do :
CameraTrackClear {},
CameraTakeAddToTrack {File = "Your Take name in parenthesis, without the .tak", Tag = "default", TargetTag = "default"},
CameraTrackPlay {}
You can add multiple takes before playing the track to have them play after each other.
Tag and TargetTag should be if you want to follow a specific character. Didn't play much with that.

I hope it helps ! Ask if there is anything unclear :3.
Have a nice day !