This tutorial will go over spawning nodes into our scene, understanding the difference between conditional and action node and some handy shortcuts/info.
Creating an Event.
First of all let’s create a new event set. Go to the Event Set column and press the add sign which will create a new event set. It should look like this:
It is good practice to rename your nodes here too. You will thank yourself later that you did! I renamed mine to “Haha some event set”. This will of course be reflected in the event set on the event set column.
Now we can go explore the fun stuff and spawn our first nodes. Go to the bottom bar of the window and add an action node and a conditional node. The default action and conditional node will be spawned (if you spawn 2 of them then they will be linked already however if they are not then just link them by dragging from the bottom of the dotted grey area of the node).
As you can see we have a node called “Action 1” and a conditional node called “if 1”
Action or Coditional Node?
An action node is a node which will do some action in the above screenshot it is the flash screen. In each action node, you have a bunch of properties that you can manipulate so for the flash screen you can change the colour and intensity of the flash. You can hover your mouse over the different properties and they will tell you what they customize.
The conditional node is basically an “if statement” so in the above example, the flash screen would trigger if a player presses forward. Conditional nodes have “then else” connectors which means if that conditional node is true then trigger these action nodes. If not then trigger other action nodes.
Consider this example:
If the key “forward” is hit, then flash the screen. If not then shake the camera.
You can access many different nodes by clicking at the dropdown tab.
However, a much better and cleaner way to choose nodes is by right-clicking on the dropdown list. This would give you a detailed explanation of what this node does and split into sections:
In some of the nodes you may see a moveable called “volume activator” for example in the distance check node:
A volume activator is any moveable or static passing through the volume. This is particularly useful if you do not mind any moveable (for this distance check node) passing through this volume and comparing distances to each other. But you must remember to check relevant activators at the bottom of the window!
However, if you want specific moveables, cameras, and statics to trigger volume. You can press the dropdown menu and select specific moveables.
In this case, compare Lara against a small scorpion.
What does this conditional node means?
- “Equal” – if the distance is equal to (there’s many comparisons – less than, more than etc to select)
- “0” – value to check the distance. Can be any number
- “All dimensions” – check the distance from any direction (vertical, horizontal, diagonal etc. You can also select “horizontal only”)
- Moveables – compare distance Lara against small scorpion.
You can also click and drag moveables from 3D view of TE to the Node editor scene itself as seen below:
You can also overwrite an existing node (if applicable):
In the next tutorial, we will discuss more about nodes.