Finishing Cinematography
There are still some camera glitches and quite a few logic errors, but this thing is just about done and I will be moving onto the c# Survival Guide for a bit.
I keep speaking about the imprecision of working in the Unity editor when it comes to sizing, placement and repeatability. It may be operator error, but I can’t really find a way around it. If you’ve ever used Cubase or Pro Tools and wanted to move waveforms around quickly and precisely, you’ll get an idea what the philosophy of the Unity editor is like. There really doesn’t seem to be a workflow to get what you’d really expect and predict, but in an absolute sense it IS WYSIWYG, but not in the way you might hope.
The lack of any sane ability that I can find to drop keyframes means a potential multiplication of errors. The fact that a keyframe may or may not miss some important parameters to write means your entire cinema scene could be tanked.
When you do manage to get things the way you think they might work, you are faced with a new uncertainty: Is it really going to show you what you wrote, or are you seeing something else? This is a confidence and workflow killer. You have no real way of knowing when you preview or play if what you are seeing is what is actually written or a bug. You have to close and restart unity every time you play if you really want to have some degree of confidence. The previews in the timeline and animation windows are worse than that! They will frequently start playing a timeline from an alternate universe if you pass certain triggers.
In so many ways, this feels like working with the first DAWs, where you would have to reboot your computer, in front of the customer constantly just to get any work done.
Its a powerful tool, but wow! Still getting comfortable here.
In other news, I’m slowly getting our audio plugins into the Unity ecosystem. I’m really not sure this is viable as moving any controls in the audio plugin system is too slow, sticky and unoptimized. It feels like when you have run WAY past your available processing power and every control takes seconds to respond. Not exactly confident realtime workflow. I have been looking into the existing plugins out there and no matter how crazy much they charge, they’re just as sticky. Is this something Unity users just tolerate? Or is it something we can fix? We shall see I guess.
