This blog will be covering the systems they use for their cameras in God of War 3. This game did an amazing job of showing how important the camera is to improving gameplay. With their ability to make every scene have a cinematic feeling and with their techniques such as using rails are some of the reasons why the cameras in this game are one of the best I've ever seen.
These cameras had many hours put into them, with four teams alone working on ensuring the best effort to have great cameras. They would spend months sometimes on making some areas really epic. On top of passing camera scenes back and forth between the programmers and artists, the QA team spent lots of time on making sure every moment was as juicy looking as the last.
A scene could have dozens of cameras in it, all used at different times to give different effects and feel to the gameplay. They would interpolate between the cameras to give smooth transitions between them. There is great emphasis on the fact that the camera isn't fixed. They have highly scripted all of their cameras to provide a cinematic play experience.
Their cameras are not controllable by the player. They did this on purpose because the team has carefully crafted each scene to look as cinematic as possible. So the main tool they used to create a film type experience with their games is the implementation of a dolly on a rail. This dolly had full maneuverability as it could move in, out, pan, zoom and tilt while on an arm.
With this system, every game frame would be calculating the position and orientation of the camera. The rails would be dependent on the factors of the players position and orientation as well as other important things in the scene such as enemies or even art assets the designers wanted to show off.
So since the player has no control and some of the level designs are tricky, there needs to be a way to help the player without bluntly telling them what to do. The camera team decided to use their cameras to help the player in regards to where they need to go or what they need to do in their levels. The way they would do that is by setting up an on-rail camera to give the best possible viewpoint on some of the specific points on the games level.
There are some links below if there are still any questions regarding the cameras in God of War 3.
Here I have a link to a reference of the God of War 3 cameras.
page=2http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-god-of-war-iii?page=2
If you are more of a video tyoe of person like me, I have a video link of the camera systems here too.
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