Matinee

From RoboBlitz Editor Wiki

This page describes how to use Matinees to make ingame cutscenes. If you're looking for a simple mover, or something like a door, check out the elevator page. Before reading this page you should be familiar with simple movers (as described on the elevator page), and Interping To Keyframes. There is also the Matinee Tutorial which tries to walk through it in more detail.

Matinee's are UE3's replacement for movers. Matinees can control moving objects, camera positions, and events.

A simple Matinee

The easiest way to create a new matinee is to place a New Matinee element in Kismet. Connect the matinee to whatever event you'd like to cause the matinee to play. Now double click on the matinee to edit it. Right click in the track bar (the light gray bar on the left) and add a new Director Group.

Director groups can control camera position as well as normal movement tracks.

An object which you want to move with a movement track must have it's physics set to PHYS_Interpolating. InterpActors use this physics by default; for other types of actors you can use Kismet to set the physics using New Action -> Physics -> Set Physics.

Keyframing a variable object

It's to create a matinee for an variable object. For instance, if I wanted to allow a player to load any object into a machine and then have a matinee fire on whatever object the player placed in the machine.

To do this, first create a matinee and use a placeholder object to create the keyframes. Once you're content with the keyframing go back to kismet and replace the placeholder object variable with the object variable of your choice. For instance, you could use an object variable that is set by an RTriggerVolume's Instigator tab.

Using the curve editor

Moving objects in the viewport is the most intuitive way to animate but sometimes it can lead to unusual tweening, especially when rotating objects. Use the curve editor to fine-tune animations. To open the curve editor, in the Matinee window click the icon of a straight blue line and a curved red line.

Tracks don't appear in the curve editor by default. To make a track appear in the curve editor, click the black box next to the track's name.