Assembly Mode

The controller sensor lets you set up the player's general view when they are possessing something, and they can obviously also control it themselves.

But sometimes you want to take over. Pointers activate when a possessed puppet walks past, and while under their influence, the camera does only what you want it to.

Maybe to be kind and provide an easier view for a tricky bit of platforming. Or maybe to stop them looking around your looks-best-in-one-view environment.

The camera pointer will take over and point the camera and stop the player from moving it around, until you switch it off with logic or another pointer takes over.

This is a simple one. Stamp a puppet and a camera pointer. Position the pointer for some kind of extreme viewpoint. Maybe from the floor looking up at the puppet.

Or way up in the sky looking down. Anything as long as it's obvious. Go to test mode and notice the camera is now locked to whatever insane view you set.

Why not try adding another pointer with a different view, and walking the puppet between them to see what happens?

Shakes the active camera, for stuff like dramatic emphasis of an explosion, or to suggest an earthquake. You can set how big you want the shake and how fast.

It will do its thing as long as it's on, so to control how long it shakes for use other gadgets. For example, you could use a counter.

Plug the counter full output into the power of the camera shaker. When the counter is incremented to its limit the shaker will shake; when it's decremented it will stop.

Here's a fun example. Stamp a timeline in, and put a camera shaker on it. Adjust the end of the camera shaker event to make it about a second long.

Tweak the timeline and set it to once. Get a puppet and open up its microchip. Tweak its puppet interface. Connect landing impact to the power port of the timeline.

Nip into test mode and possess the puppet. Try a jump. Your puppet is causing a minor earthquake. Try messing about with the tweaks to see the effect.

There are many ways to illuminate your scenes, but sometimes only a light will do. For an indistinct, omni-directional effect, choose diffuse from the tweak menu.

Or choose a spot when you need a definite directional beam. Spot has the most options - beam angle, beam range, etc - while diffuse just has brightness and colour.

With a spot you can even select from a range of semi-abstract images for the spot to project, giving the light texture and opening the way for creative effects.

Lights are not cheap, so use them sparingly. Light & colour effects and sun & sky are best for general scene lighting, and glowing objects make great alternate light sources.

Let's make a disco light. Stamp a light in. Tweak it, and go to the colour tweak. On the shade triangle, drag the picker out to the very tip of the right-hand corner.

This is where the most intense shade is to be found, and we don't want an insipid disco light, do we? Now stamp an action recorder into the scene.

Spin the outer ring of the colour tweak around a few times. The hue will change as you spin and the action recorder will capture it all.

Hit stop recording when you're happy, then start time and check out your disco.

Fog has all sorts of dramatic applications. Mist floating over water, a moody scene with haze swirling under streetlamps, or a spooky shroud for monsters to appear from.

Your scenes have a generalised fog you can adjust the distance of in sun & sky. But this gives you a zone of fog with a bunch of tweak options. You can even make it glow.

Let's have a look at it. Stamp in a fog gadget. Tweak it, go to shape, and make it a cube. Drag out the sides to make a wall of fog. Stamp in a signal generator.

Connect its signal output to the density input on the fog. Start time and watch the fog fade in and out. Spooky!

Use this to tweak the sun & sky to get them looking the way you want. You can fiddle with everything from the size of the sun to the style of flecks the sky is made from.

Put a single static one in a scene to define your visuals. Use other gadgets to tweak one over time. Or even use logic to switch between two or more of them.

Use them to create a gorgeous sunset, herald a coming storm, make a perfect summer day, or let loose a terrible sun-expanding apocalypse on your scene.

Let's play with it a bit. Stamp a sun & sky gadget. An awful lot can be done just using the gizmos. The ball on top of the gadget is the sky.

If you grab it and drag it around, you can change the sky angle. The other ball is the sun. Grab that and move it up and down the stick to make it closer or further away.

You can also resize it, making it a teeny weeny sun, as if you were on Mars. Or bigger, for that apocalyptic scenario we mentioned earlier. You can also move it around.

Make it low for a setting sun, or way high up for noon. Most of the options for the sky are in the tweak menu. You can choose a sky image, for example.

This dramatically changes the look of the sky. Have a play about with the tweaks and the gizmos to see what sorts of effects you can get.

And remember you can animate them using the action recorder to do stuff like day and night cycles and weather and so on.

There's plenty you can do in the scene itself to get the visuals you want. But this gives you a host of options for adjusting the final output of the image onscreen as a whole.

Control the overall brightness and contrast, sure. But also apply colour grading in multiple ways. Pick shadow colours, add a vignette, give it bloom, you name it.

There are also some special graphical effects to play with - pixelation, glitching, scan lines and more. In short, there's plenty here to satisfy the most ambitious visualist.

Let's take a look. Stamp one in and tweak it. On the screen effects page, find the grain slider. Bump that up till you're happy. Nip over to pixelation effects.

Add some scan lines using the slider. On the same page, there's a graphic tweak at the bottom for adding a glitch. Move the handle around.

Wherever you put it, just watch a minute for the full effect. Head back to screen effects and nudge up the pincushion slider to the right a bit.

Your screen should be looking pretty dodgy by now! As with any of these visual gadgets, it's best to just play around to get the effect that you want.

And remember, you can also animate them using the action recorder.

Wipes, otherwise known as transitions, are a fancy way to change from one view to another without a jarring cut, and you can make these using the wiper.

There's a choice of wipe styles, including our lovely Dreams bokeh. You can add glow, adjust the softness of lines, and of course control the timing in and out of the wipe.

You can also combine wipers to great effect, for example putting down 4 linear ones to make a square wipe, or making a gradient using different coloured wipers.

If you want a transition from one scene to another, do it via the doorway, which has a built-in wiper in the form of a page of tweaks mostly matching the ones here.

Let's do a cartoony wipe. Stamp in a shape, a wiper, 2 timers and a signal manipulator. Tweak one of the timers to give it a target time of 7s. Leave the other one on 5s.

Connect both timer finished (pulse) outputs to the signal input on the signal manipulator. Now connect the signal output to the power port of the wiper.

To get the wiper to full power, we'll need to tweak the signal manipulator. Set it to custom remapper, and under edge mode, select toggle output at ON.

Now back to the wiper. Under wipe style, select hole. Then select track object and link it to the shape. Now start time and check it out.

The different target time settings mean the wipe will start at 5s and stop at 7s. Why not mess around with the wiper tweaks to see what other sort of effects you can achieve?

Keeping things in scale is always important. You don't want to lovingly craft a character only to find it's a giant compared to the house you built for it earlier.

Select this and a 3D ruler will appear on your imp tip. Hold it next to something you want to measure, or stamp it into the scene and build things around it (or even inside it).

If you need to change the size and proportions, just use the stretch tool. The scale will remain the same.