Same as the title. I'm wondering how you make them. I went through the files and them make no sense to me. Can anyone explain?
Is there anyway to make them without that software? Or some other free program to make them? I can't afford to purchase Spline.
Bump? I really want to make campaigns with cutscenes. If there isn't another way, is it possible to make them manually? --- Post updated --- Any free alternatives for spine that would also work with beamng?
Have you taken a look at the official content? Frankly I'd recommend focusing on scenarios and not wasting your time with the cutscene system for now. There's always a need for more fun, challenging, and innovative scenarios. The nice cutscenes in the official content certainly took some work even if they used pay-for software tools. Note that the devs also had to create assets for all the pretty text labels you see in the cutscenes. If you are determined to make cutscenes by hand, the paths are "SimPath" type and you'll find them in the prefabs for scenarios which have them. I don't know whether the current editor can create SimPaths and Markers (it can certainly display them) but I'd probably just copy a SimPath from an exsiting scenario's prefab into my own. Once you've got a SimPath understand that you'll need to have many "Marker"s for the camera and you must define all of these things for every Marker: That's how the camera rolls, yaws, speeds up, slows down, dwells, etc. (and also how it moves smoothly between a handful of points)
You can make 3d animation for free with blender, Like @torsion said you can use SimPath object to make a camera animation and at the beginning of the scenario you load a file just for the intro
Can Blender export something which can be converted to a SimPath? If so I'd suddenly be much more interested.. although I'm still not really sure how the workflow would look for a modder. You'd grab an official terrain and get that loaded and scaled in Blender, then somewhat blindly setup the animation and any onscreen labels?
I'm fairly certain that the OP was referring to the 2d animations as seen in the 'Rocky Start' campaign, rather than the camera-based overviews as seen in the 'Senseless Destruction' campaign. Not to say that advice on the latter isn't useful. Looking at the files, it almost looks like the comics system does have code that defines each layer's position, orientation, and source image, and how that layer moves and deforms over time. Moreover, the code is partly human-readable, which means it theoretically could be built through code alone. If what I've said is true, that makes it possible to create comics without Spine or any similar program, but leaves it difficult and unintuitive enough that you'd be hard pressed to make anything more than static imagery. A true comic, then.
Ah, thanks @Occam's Razer. I totally misunderstood the question - and I still didn't catch on based on @SergentFido's response! I couldn't guess why a 2D animation package was being used for generating 3-dimensional camera paths, but since I thought that I knew what the conversation was about I just rolled with it.
Yeah, That's what I meant. The code sorta is readable, I might later try to mess around and see what modifies what ingame.
