The Commanders - Camera Suite controls

[Strangepork]

Hail fellow Commanders.

I have seen a lot of confused posts with people frustrated at the complexity of setting up the new camera suite included with The Commanders release so I thought some explanation based on my own findings may be helpful.

First of all forget the free camera is a camera and think of it as flying another ship or drone with your own ship as its target!

With this concept in mind everything else should be relatively straight forward.


The Camera

The camera can be in one of two states - fixed or free.

A Fixed camera is static and does not move from its subject...as such you can really only look at what it is pointing at and any movement of the controls will affect the ship itself rather than the camera. There are 5 internal fixed camera
positions and 3 external fixed camera positions.

The Free camera is just that - you can pan it around; roll, pitch, yaw and slew left and right, up and down. You can roll it around it's own axis and zoom in and out and then lock it in a new aspect creating a bespoke external fixed camera.

The free camera can be accessed from any of the 5 internal or 3 external fixed cameras.

Caution: If you access the free camera from any of the 5 internal fixed camera's it is best to be gentle with the flight controls because they do cause some ship movement as well as moving the camera - you are better off sticking to the zoom and blur functions on the internal cameras.

When you access the free camera from any of the 3 external fixed cameras you are essentially piloting a drone with your own ship as it's target, although this can be changed by detaching the camera. When you detach the camera you are locking it in a fixed aspect and are then free to control your ship from a distance - again caution is advisable here as your ship can quickly disappear from the field of view and you will not be able to see where it is headed unless you change to the regular fixed camera's or exit the suite entirely.

After a bit of practice you will quickly get to grips with this...it's pretty cool watching yourself pilot your ship as a spectator. At this point you can lock your camera back to the ship and it will become a new temporary fixed camera.


Distance Limitations

The camera will allow you to zoom out from the point of focus to a limited range. Whether in your SRV or your ship on a planet surface the distance is restricted to 250 metres. Once clear of a body the distance increases to 3000 metres. Once the camera reaches either of these distances it is dragged along with the point of focus as if it were tethered to it.


The Controls

Ok, so enough explanation of the what, here's the meat and tatties of how:

In free camera mode you can bind the controls using exactly the same keys and controllers you use for flying your ship - these do NOT affect the ships controls or indeed even tell you that a key or axis is already in use! This is important because many of you think that you cannot use these functions as they are already assigned to controlling your ship.


Obviously there are going to be a lot of different controllers in use but as a guide here are the settings I have used with my X56 Rhino HOTAS controller.

The main control actions are boxed in blue for the throttle (camera travel forward and backward with the throttle X-axis and camera left, right, up and down using the H3 analogue stick).

The main control actions are boxed in green for the stick (camera pitch on the Y axis, yaw on the RZ axis and roll on the X axis).

All other functions are made with various buttons and hat switches on both stick and throttle as I find natural to me. The main thing is to use the flight stick and throttle to manoeuvre the camera exactly as you would your ship, once you
have these in place and are comfortable you can tweak the buttons and switches for the other functions as you see fit.


http://i.imgur.com/V5yq2EH.jpg


My X56 HOTAS settings for the camera:

http://i.imgur.com/Jf9PXyT.jpg


Edit: Short Camera Demo video added

https://youtu.be/yQtOZ7XB_hM

Youtube Link


I hope this is of some help to those of you struggling with the camera suite.

Fly safe Commanders

Rardain

Great post CMDR, thanks so much.

 

[Rardain]

Thanks a lot for posting this in the exploration forum! Some people like me don't venture outside of this forum at all, although we range free all over the galaxy

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours fiddling around with the camera, and I came to pretty much the same conclusions and results as you did. What I found additionally confusing is that some of the bindings are labelled differently in the configuration screen and in the HUD:

Label in configuration screen	Label in HUD
Lock to vehicle	"Ship controls" or "Camera controls"
Lock to world	"Detach camera" or "Attach camera"
Toggle rotation lock	"Stabiliser off" or "Stabiliser on"

If you find the time maybe you could integrate this into your screenshot.

Thanks chap, I have added your information to the controls list in the OP.

I have also added a 5 minute video showing me throwing my ship around whilst playing with the camera to show off how intuitive the camera movement is.

[video=youtube_share;yQtOZ7XB_hM]https://youtu.be/yQtOZ7XB_hM[/video]

 

[Qohen Leth]

Edit, on the point of a bug.. I consider it a bug if you can (by pressing a button) make things completely unrealistic. To me, the camera shouldn't have gotten such a large zoom in / out function, they should have tested how extreme the zoom function would get. I mean, the Field Of View under settings / graphic doesn't, even when completely zoomed out, make planets look like giant eggs.

On my game FOV of 85°, it does that, again, it's how it works, period. If you ever tried playing on a triple monitor setup, it's the same principle.

The game is by definition and agreement unrealistic, and that camera is a tool, not an in-universe feature, so I'm not sure what's the point of mentioning it... It's not a bug.

 

[malenfant]

Hm, I have never seen it before.. If I take a screenshot where the planet is "on the edge" from before 2.3:

The example you showed wouldn't illustrate it so well because most of the planet is off camera. Here's one that does - this is with FOV on the minimum setting (54.32°), pre 2.3:

Spoiler

If you compare the shape of the planet to a true circle, you'll find it's actually stretched-out horizontally because of the distortion on the edge of the screen.

 

[malenfant]

Damn. I'm not sure that the zoom does actually remove the distortions. I'm zoomed in at 2.0x and 2.4x and the planets are still distorted into non-circular shapes.

 

[Qohen Leth]

Damn. I'm not sure that the zoom does actually remove the distortions. I'm zoomed in at 2.0x and 2.4x and the planets are still distorted into non-circular shapes.

Just keep 'em in the center of the screen.

 

[Macedonica]

Great post - thanks for sharing!

 

[CMDR Reaper]

Excellent guide!

It helped a lot. Thanks!

 

[malenfant]

OK, my apologies - I was mistaken in my first post on this thread. (I've corrected that now)

My FOV setting is at 54.32 (in the settings.xml file - this is also determined by the slider in the Graphics Options in the game). This means that the vertical FOV is 54.32° (this is true whatever your screen resolution is).

If you want to know your Horizontal FOV, the formula is as follows (this includes your monitor's aspect ratio so different people may have different values for this):

HORIZONTAL = 2 * ARCTAN [(tan(VERTICAL/2)) /(height/width)]
(source: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=21849&p=484349&viewfull=1#post484349 )

where HORIZONTAL = Horizontal FOV in degrees
VERTICAL = Vertical FOV in degrees (from settings.xml file)
height = height of screen in pixels
width = width of screen in pixels

I am at 1920x1080 resolution, so my horizontal FOV is 2 * ARCTAN [Tan (54.32/2)/(1080/1920)] = 84.735°

Remember, your Horizontal FOV will depend on your screen's aspect ratio!

The zoom setting that is equivalent to the cockpit view is x2.4. (at least this is true for my 1920x1080 resolution, or 16:9 aspect ratio)

I have determined this by calculating the angular diameters of objects with known radius and distance, and approaching them until they exactly filled the height and width of my screen. I verified that the vertical and horizontal FOVs were 54.32° and 84.735° for my screen and resolution. The Zoom at 2.4x is exactly equivalent to this. NOTE: to calculate the angular diameter of a nearby planet larger than a few degrees across, use angular diameter (in degrees) = 2*(arcsin (d/2D)) where d = diameter (not radius!) of planet in km, and D = distance to centre of planet (shown when targeted in ED) - the small angle approximation won't work for those (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter)

What I'm stuck on is what the relationship is between Zoom Factor and FOV. It seems that Zoom of 0.8x increases the vertical FOV to 84.735 degrees (a planet that exactly fills my view horizontally at zoom 2.4x instead exactly fills my vertical FOV at 0.8x). But what's the mathematical relation there? Zoom is 1/3rd of what it was, but the FOV isn't three times bigger (in fact it's very close to 14/9th bigger, which may or may not be significant?). Anyone got any ideas?

After a bit more experimentation, I've got the following values for what the zoom does to my vertical FOV:

3.7x = 31.8245° (horizontal: 53.754°)
2.4x = 54.32° (horizontal: 84.735°)
0.8x = 84.735° (horizontal: 116.67°)
0.0x = 98.231° (horizontal: 128.069°)

I tried plotting that on a graph (vertical FOV as y-axis, zoom as x-axis) and it came out linear! The trendline that excel figured out was a bit clunky though: Vertical FOV = [-18.114*(zoom factor)]+98.524 - again, I think this may only be true for 16:9 screen ratios. Does that formula make any sense?! I can't think why it would be like that physically.

 

[Traesha]

It looks like FoV and zoom controls could use a seperate guide

 

[malenfant]

Is anyone able to calculate equivalent numbers for the FOVs and zoom factors for other resolutions/aspect ratios (using my post above) that aren't 16:9?

 

[herzbube]

First time that I have tried the camera suite planetside, and I am completely baffled (again) by the free camera. As soon as I switch from fixed to free camera mode (while in the "SRV Back" camera), the SRV starts to drive forward while the camera at the same time starts to move backwards and away from the SRV. This is different from how the shipside free camera behaves: There only the free camera moves away from the ship, but the ship itself stays put. Does anyone else observe this also, or have I somehow misconfigured something? I'm on a HOTAS, by the way.

 

[dape]

First time that I have tried the camera suite planetside, and I am completely baffled (again) by the free camera. As soon as I switch from fixed to free camera mode (while in the "SRV Back" camera), the SRV starts to drive forward while the camera at the same time starts to move backwards and away from the SRV. This is different from how the shipside free camera behaves: There only the free camera moves away from the ship, but the ship itself stays put. Does anyone else observe this also, or have I somehow misconfigured something? I'm on a HOTAS, by the way.

I have the same problem in SRV and when in SC. In normal flight everything is fine.
Also mapped everything to a HOTAS.

thrust and free cam on the throttle full forward. I followed the Youtube tutorial by Cmdr Josh Hawkins (dont have the link on my phone)

 

[Alec Turner]

Nice guide Rardain! I've taken the liberty of linking it in the screenshots section of my best of forum thread over here ...

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/321074-Alec-s-best-of-the-forum-(and-elsewhere)-thread

Also - I attempted to explain how to use the zoom/blur/focus stuff in another thread. Not the clearest explanation in the world but might be worth including here.

Suteksio has already answered this but for my part ... I did a fair bit of trial and error (despite sort of understanding the principles). Basically I ended up increasing the blur practically to its maximum (which basically gives you a very small, precise depth of field, thus maximising the blur effect - in other words, only a very small part of the scene will be in focus). Then you use the focus control to set the distance to be the distance from the camera to the thing you want to be sharply in focus (in practice you don't really know this distance so it's largely trial and error, increasing and decreasing it until the thing you're interested in comes into focus). When I first did this the effect was fairly subtle but then I remembered that someone has said that increasing the zoom helped to exaggerate the effect. Not being a photographer I don't really understand this but it certainly works. So rather than moving the camera until the the thing you want to photograph is nicely framed, if you move the camera further back and then zoom in to frame the subject, the blur effect seems to be more dramatic. One other thing, once you've got the depth of field and point of focus set the way you want, if you start moving the camera around you'll notice your point of focus moves with you. I guess this isn't surprising but it is cool. For example, if you get everything set up so the nose of your your ship is in sharp focus and everything else is blurred, if you want to take a similar shot of the tail of the ship, rather than repeating the entire process again from the back, leave the blur/zoom/focus settings alone and just reposition the camera.

---

Actually I'm just gonna link that entire thread in here 'cos it's got some good stuff.

How-to-use-blur-effect-(New-camera)

 

[Rardain]

First time that I have tried the camera suite planetside, and I am completely baffled (again) by the free camera. As soon as I switch from fixed to free camera mode (while in the "SRV Back" camera), the SRV starts to drive forward while the camera at the same time starts to move backwards and away from the SRV. This is different from how the shipside free camera behaves: There only the free camera moves away from the ship, but the ship itself stays put. Does anyone else observe this also, or have I somehow misconfigured something? I'm on a HOTAS, by the way.

I have the same problem in SRV and when in SC. In normal flight everything is fine.
Also mapped everything to a HOTAS.

thrust and free cam on the throttle full forward. I followed the Youtube tutorial by Cmdr Josh Hawkins (dont have the link on my phone)

Hi Herzube and Dape,

I am not seeing the issues you are describing either in SC or from the SRV, however, I do not use my HOTAS to control the SRV as I find it cumbersome and unnatural. I bought a cheap xbox controller to use with my PC for controlling the SRV - works much better, at least for me.

The camera controls are still linked to the HOTAS so you do have to be careful using certain cameras with the SRV. If you have particularly rough terrain or high gravity and are going hell for leather in the SRV it's probably not a good idea to start mucking about with the cameras in the first place [woah], but on flatter terrain I reckon you can get some good air shots considering I took this back in the old debug camera days.

I can only assume the issues you are experiencing are related to the HOTAS setup for controlling the SRV - do you have any conflicting settings?

I have made another video this morning and am currently (slooowly) uploading to youtube so I will share it here when it's done.

Cheers

Rardain

 

[Susanna]

I am slowly getting used to it. I have it also bound to my Hotas. One thing I am still struggeling with is with the SRV. When I enter the cam mode and then enter free camera the SRV starts moving forward. I have to set the handbrake to avoid that. No idea how to fix this.

Same Problem here! I'm using a Thrustmaster T16000M FCS hotas. If you find a solution, please let me know!!! I've logged a support ticket and have posted a thread on the discussion board about this...

 

[Rardain]

The SRV demo is now up on the OP. The quality is a bit lacking on both video's because I had to edit them as WMV's to reduce the size - if I had better broadband I would put them up at full HD quality oh well.

[video=youtube_share;502GBZudxPQ]https://youtu.be/502GBZudxPQ[/video]

 

[Alec Turner]

Just cross-linking these two threads ...

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/342900-2-3-Camera-Suite-Tutorial

 

[dape]

Same Problem here! I'm using a Thrustmaster T16000M FCS hotas. If you find a solution, please let me know!!! I've logged a support ticket and have posted a thread on the discussion board about this...

do you have a link to your bug report so I can chime in on that one? Thanx!

 

[Magic Man]

The fact that the bindings admin allows you to set the same controls for the free camera as for flight seems to suggest to me that the intention is that the flight controls whilst in free camera mode should be disabled - yet they are not. Is this a bug or by design?

If this is by design then it's a strange, practically unusable one and they would have been better off having a toggle action to flip duplicated bindings between camera and ship control. Why have a ship and camera "mode" if the intention is that the flight controls are always active?