UT2004 movie transitions using Matinee - by Koen Heltzel a.k.a. Base
This tutorial shows you how to use Matinee scenes (made in UnrealEd) to create transitions for a gamemovie. I don't feel like describing every single click of the mouse, I will explain the general technique, and the rest you'll have to figure out yourself. To follow this tutorial you should be familiar with UnrealEd (including Matinee), using dumpframes, and video-editing software like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere. I'll show you how to combine these two things to make nice transitions.
If you want to learn Matinee, I recommend the video-tutorials by 3DBuzz, downloadable from their site (after you register for free), or if you have the UT2004 SE they'll be on the 2nd DVD.
I'm writing this tutorial because after releasing GNA: The movie (which had a lot of Matinee scenes too), I received a lot of questions about the techniques I used. If you use techniques described in this tutorial please consider to credit me in your movie.
| First of all I made a very simple Matinee scene (for this tutorial) of a model standing in LavaGiant with the camera turning around him. In UnrealEd it looks like this. |  |
Now imagine a fragmovie with some frags on LavaGiant (not likely to happen but whatever ;P). After showing all the frags on lavagiant you may want some transition to the next map which you have some frags of (say ONS-CBP2-Tropica). I already have a Matinee scene in map A, if I would copy this scene (including the model) to map B, I would have 2 identical Matinee scenes (same model and same camera movements), but in a different environment. If we capture those scenes and put them on top of each other in video-editing software, we can make a fade from one map to the other, keeping the same camera transition and model etc. Sounds complicated? Don't worry, down this page there are animated examples to show you what the end result will look like.
Anyway, let's copy the Matinee scene from LavaGiant to ONS-CBP2-Tropica.
 |
You do this by selecting all the items that are involved in the Matinee scene, in my case SceneManager, 3 Interpolation points, xPawn and A.I. script. Then do a CTRL+C. |
Now comes the tricky part. You would expect you could just copy these items into the other map while it's open, but the editor will crash. It does that because these items refer to the myLevel package of the particular map. Because they don't exist yet in the second map it decides it doesn't like that and therefor crashes.
To remove these references to the myLevel package we open notepad. Do a CTRL-V (Paste), and you will see code that UnrealEd generated when you did the CTRL-C in UnrealEd. In this code there are quite some instances of the word myLevel. We need to remove all those instances. The quickest way to do this to go to Edit --> Replace. In the first field (Find what) you put: "myLevel.". This way notepad will remove every instance of 'myLevel.', which is what we want. Press 'Replace All' to delete the instances. |
 |
Now that we have the correct code to feed to UnrealEd, we can do a CTRL-A (select all) and CTRL-C in notepad.
 |
After opening the second map we can just CTRL-V in UnrealEd (just select a random viewport first). And there's my scene on a beautiful beach :P Note: You can change the position of the whole scene, but can't rotate it. If you rotate the scene, the camerapaths will be fucked up. The only solution I found was rotating the entire map instead of the matinee scene. |
This is how the two scenes look (very small, but whatever):
| LavaGiant | Tropica |
 |
 |
The nice thing about duplicating Matinee scenes and then capturing them using the dumpframes command is that you end up with 2 exactly similar in length avi's.
If we import these avi's into video editing software (Sony Vegas in my case), you'll see that the clips are similar in length. In the example on the right I put them on top of each other, and made the opacity of the top channel go from 100% to 0%. This means that at the begin you'll see the top video (LavaGiant), but as it plays gradually it changes to the bottom video, Tropica. |
 |
So when we export this video from Vegas it looks like this:
Basically that was what we aimed for at the start of this tutorial. We have a transition between two maps, nice and smooth. Of course this technique can be used in so many ways...
Some more examples
 |
In GNA: The movie, (at 13 minutes, 50 seconds) there's a scene where bots shoot at each other using the link gun, and spell out "G N A". Even though this is a pretty complicated Matinee scene, it was easy to copy it into other maps to achieve the nice effect as seen on the left. |
In GNA: The movie, (at 23 minutes, 40 seconds) there's a scene where someone shoots a longdistance shot with the instagib rifle. As you can see on the right, this beam slowly grows (in UT this is not the case of course). The way I did this: First I made the matinee scene with the bot scripted to shoot. Then I used the same scene, but told the bot not to shoot. So I had two similar avi's: 1 with beam, 1 without beam. By masking the video with beam, it looked like it moved towards it's goal :D |
 |
Another neat trick
The two examples above may have given you a few ideas of how and where to apply this technique. I would like to give another trick away that enables you to get even more out of the Matinee / Video-editing relationship.
 |
If we copy the Matinee scene into a completely white map (use the unlit property on a white texture), and put no light in it, the model will stay completely black. This way we'll get a perfect pure white/black version of our Matinee scene. |
The avi would look something like this:
We could then use this avi as a mask in the video editor, to only apply effects to the model, or the world around it.
The following screenie is an example of that, with only the background being black&white and blurred.
Cool huh? I showed the last one as a single screenie as I thought this page is already heavy enough + it's easier to see the effect like this, but if you see an effect like this in a movie it's pretty cool.
So that's basically what I wanted to share with you guys, hope you learned something from it and gave you some inspiration ;) . I hope to see some wicked stuff in upcoming UT2004 movies.
Any comments on this tutorial? Post them in here (3Dbuzz), here (Atari), here (Machinima), here (own-age), or e-mail me.