QUA Export Improvements

[Krevil]

There are several issues I have encountered whilst exporting QUA files for use in a Halo 3 cinematic scene. The attached zipped blend file below shows several of these when creating a QUA file using it.
qua export improvements.zip

1. The first thing that will be noticed upon exporting the scene is that an error will occur. This is because the blend file contains actions named blah and CameraAction that do not follow the correct naming format.

Instead of causing the export to fail, the blah action should instead be disregarded.

2. The CameraAction action is mapped to the Ubercam's focal length. In order for it to be exported, it must be named shot 0 or any other decimal. The Blender implementation of this is quite awkward; the action does not appear in the Action Editor or Non-Linear Animation. Because of this, only one action for the focal length can be created and when imported into a cinematic_scene tag, this action will be used for every shot.

Improving this would likely require some kind of new panel to specify and animate the field of view and potentially other properties.

3. Multiple ubercameras in a scene will cause the resulting file to have no shots. In the attached file, you can create an additional camera and name it &ubercam1. Upon exporting and importing the QUA file into a cinematic_scene tag, it will contain no shots.

Ideally, both cameras should be exported if they have valid actions. Otherwise, the first camera should be exported. This is a slightly annoying issue because if a QUA file is imported with no valid shots, it will erase the current shots in the file and any custom data that has been manually entered into them such as dialog, music and custom scripts.

4. The field of view in Blender does not match the resulting field of view in-game. In order to get a field of view value that will match what is seen in-game, I need to use an online calculator to convert horizontal field of view to vertical field of view. The vertical field of view can then be written into the camera lens Field of View, and in-game it will show the correct horizontal field of view.

Ideally, this calculation should be done automatically on export so that the field of view of the camera in Blender can match the in-game output.

5. The QUA exporter should be able to take armatures and animations in the scene and add them to the resulting QUA file. The user would specify a unit or scenery tag to match each armature in the scene and specify an action to use for each ubercam shot so that it could be appropriately named. Each animation would then be exported to the object's data folder within a subdirectory following the retail format such as objects\characters\masterchief\cinematics\letterboxes\testcinematic\animations\testcinematic_masterchief_scene1_1
   The only part of the animation name that must be enforced is the _1 which denotes which shot in a scene the animation is for. The user could also specify whether the cinematic is a letterbox, perspective or vignette to determine the folder animations go into. In the cinematic scene, an object's identifier should match the animations that is appropriate for the current scene, in the current example this would be testcinematic_masterchief_scene1 - this should also ideally be exported.

This improvement is the most contentious as currently it is not that difficult to simply export the animations by hand and add the units and animations to the tag in Guerilla. I am also unaware of what limitations there are to the QUA format, so this may be more or less possible depending upon that.

6. It would be handy to be able to import QUA files. In cases where source files are lost, this could be useful to have as an option.