The panels
Every Blendable asset opens on a panel that reads broad to fine. The big decisions come first, each feature is one line with its switch, and the fine numbers wait until you want them.
A Rig, a Camera Preset, a point of interest, a shake and a Lock-On Preset all open on a panel laid out the same way. What changes the shot most sits at the top, and the finer a setting is, the further down it lives. You can tune most of a camera without scrolling.
Bands#
Each panel is a few bands, in order, with the later ones folded:
| Asset | Bands |
|---|---|
| Rig | The Shot, Following, Collision, Feel, Advanced, The Whole Rig |
| Camera Preset | The Camera, Other Shots, The World, Comfort, Advanced |
| Point of interest | What It Does, When It Acts, Advanced |
| Shake | The Shake, Timing And Reach, Advanced |
| Lock-On Preset | The Shot, Behaviour, Feel, Advanced |
Three of them open on a picture of what you're tuning. A Rig shows where the character sits in the frame, a shake draws its graph, and a Lock-On Preset shows the shot from the side, with the arm and the lens to drag.
Lines#
Each feature is one line: its name, its switch, and a few words in italics on what it's doing right now, or Off. Tick a switch and the feature's settings come in under it. The ones you'll rarely touch wait in a More fold beneath them.
So a shake's Playing Again line carries the Only One At A Time switch, and reads Copies add up until you tick it. A Rig's Follow Lag line is Off until you want lag, and then reads something like Hangs back from 250 to 600 cm/s, up to 120 cm.
Every setting is on its panel exactly once. One that hasn't been given a line of its own still has a home, under Advanced, so nothing is ever hidden, and the plugin's tests fail if a setting is missing from a panel or shown twice.
Copy Or Paste The Whole#
Every panel ends with Copy Or Paste The Whole Rig, Preset, Point Of Interest or Shake, in The Whole Rig on a Rig and in Advanced everywhere else. Copy puts every setting on the clipboard as one line of text. Paste sets them all from it, as one change you can undo.
It's useful for more than it sounds:
- Moving a tuned asset to another project, or to an older engine that can't open the file.
- Sharing a setup in a message or a bug report, as text.
- Keeping a version you liked in a text file, and pasting it back after an experiment.
- Building the shipped content on engines that install without it. The values pages are these blocks.
A block from a newer version may name settings yours doesn't have. The paste skips those, says which, and carries on. References to other assets come across as their paths, so they only find their asset in a project that has it.
Starting points#
The Whole Rig also holds Start From Archetype: First Person, Cinematic, Top Down, Isometric, Side Scroller and more. Pick one and click Apply Archetype to reset the Rig to that starting point. It's a fresh start, not a merge: whatever the archetype has no opinion on goes back to its default.