PsychoCam

My initial challenge was getting the player to see through a different camera than the default head-mounted one. We already knew how to cut to it for a short amount of time, but it would always cut back to the player when finished. I accomplished this by making a SEPARATE matinee track that specifically loops the director command that cuts to the camera.

I then attached the camera to the newly spawned actor by orienting it appropriately with the player spawn point (this took some tweaking).

My next challenge would be to use a trigger to initiate a camera movement. I was extremely happy to discover that any camera movements I set up stayed relative to the player, instead of snapping the camera away from the player and going to the position it was animated at. I could also set up a trigger to reverse this function, changing the camera back to normal.

I decided to push further - I wanted full post-process control based on triggers. The camera had matinee controls for post process effects, but they seemed to do absolutely nothing. Thanks to my highly advanced tech-art skills (ie a Google search) I managed to isolate a single command in the camera settings: Cam Override Post Process. This is apparently a blended percentage between the game's post processing and an individual camera's post processing. AWESOME! I noticed while working on this that animating the value in Matinee doesn't seem to work; it has to be set manually in the camera's settings. Perhaps something else was wrong. I didn't have time to troubleshoot; the good thing was that it was working.

So now I have a modular camera setup that can be used to change post-processing, including depth of field, desaturation, motion blur and bloom as well as camera movements and Field of View.