How To Film Cinematics In Star Wars Battlefront 2

Welcome! to a comprehensive guide on how to film cinematics and machinima in Star Wars Battlefront 2, by turning the HUD off on consoles PS4 and Xbox One, and on PC using the cinematic tools mod.

Hey everyone it’s Andrew! I first need to give a special thanks to Cinematic Captures for helping put together the PC side of the information here. Alright so the first thing you will need is some recording software or hardware. For console I’d recommend an Elgato Game Capture, there are a few different models, you can choose the one you like. And for PC I’d recommend the software Nvidia G-Force Experience. You’ll use these to actually record the footage on your screen that you see in game. There are lots of tutorials out there about how to actually capture footage, but what we’re going to teach you is how to actually manipulate the game to be able to film the footage.

Alright so Star Wars Battlefront 2 is still without a spectate mode and private matches, making it much more difficult to film those amazing artsy shots in game.

For how to turn off HUD on console to film cinematics and machinima, refer to this post here, with recently added changes on how to turn off HUD in game.

It also makes things a lot easier leaving the zoom mode on toggle. That way, you won’t have to hold your finger on the aim button the whole time your filming. No one likes a sore finger. No one likes a sore anything!

Alright so there it is. Now on to PC and Cinematic Tools. So first, if you don’t know, Cinematic Tools is a mod for PC made by this guy, and the tools can be found here. Basically it allows you to manipulate and control a camera in game so that you can film cinematics and films and screenshots and whatever you like! Also just as a side note, if you’re noticing these different clone trooper skins, we had another cosmetic mod activated while filming all this footage.

So after you install cinematic tools, launch your game, launch cinematic tools, then jump into an offline mode and we can start filming. You’re not really supposed to use cinematic tools in online games as it’s a mod, so I’d avoid that.

So once you’re in an offline game mode, spawn in, and you’ll have this cinematic tools menu pop up. Now what I’m going to do is go over all the basic controls for the mod. There’s quite a few and you can do some pretty creative camera work, but don’t worry if you can’t get them down all at once. Just use this as a starting guide. Also, we’d recommend also using a controller to use cinematic tools, as it makes moving the camera around a lot easier. So you might want to plug a controller into your pc. Also we will leave a link to all these cinematic tools instructions in the description.

Alright so once you’ve spawned in, you’ll see your player as always, and also the cinematic tools menu. Now how do you use the tools.

First I’ll go through your hotkeys that will give you control of what you’re doing.

• Delete key freezes time, which then allows you to move around and take screenshots.
• Insert Key is freecam, which is going to give you control of your camera movement.
• Home Key is Toggle HUD. This allows you to turn the HUD on and off.
• FOV zoom is page up key on keyboard, the scroll wheel on mouse, and the right joystick pressed in on controller. You can also control this via the tool interface.
• F5 is toggle tools interface, which minimises the cinematic tools menu giving you a blank screen to film on.

Alright now I’ll go over the actual tool interface.

• Movement speed changes how fast you can move around. Slow this down for smooth cinematic shots.
• Rotation speed changes how fast you can look around. You might also want to slow this one down.
• FOV speed changes how fast you can zoom in and out.
• Disable keyboard and mouse input, when ticked, allows you to move around in freecam using your mouse and keyboard, and when unticked, you can use the mouse and keyboard to move the player, leaving the freecam locked in position.
• Disable gamepad input, when ticked, allows you to use a controller to move the freecam around the player smoothly, and when unticked, prevents you from moving the freecam or the player.
• Lock to player locks the camera to the player’s movement. This tends to be quite buggy though.
• Shake camera toggles that cinematic camera shake everyone seems to either really love or really hate.
• Shake speed, the higher the number, the slower the shake.
• Max shake angle the higher the number, the more shake there is.

Ok, onto creating a camera track.

• To create a camera keyframe, press the f key. To delete the most recent camera keyframe, press the g key.
• To play the camera track, press the p key, and once the camera track is over, you’ll need to press p again to leave the fixed camera position so you can move again.
• Node duration, the higher the number, the quicker the track plays, the lower the number, the slower it plays. You get it.

Ok, visuals.

• Remove horizontal bloom removes the anamorphic lens flare look. The makes lightsabers look better and generally makes things glow a bit more.
• Enable filmic elements when ticked enables chromatic abberation and gives a slight bulge to the centre of the image.
• Enable film grain seems to be pretty unnoticable but if you think there’s more film grain, if you want more film grain, go ahead and tick it.
• Enable radial blur doesn’t seem to actually remove the radial blur around the edges, so if you want to change radial blur, go into the actual battlefront 2 settings.
• Enable vignette when ticked adds a black vignette frame around the edges of the frame.
• Alright next is depth of field controls. If you want that depth of field blur, enable depth of field.
• Focal distance- this changes the area of focus, the higher the number, the further away the point of focus.
• Max blur changes the strength of the blur.
• Near start and near length is the transitional period of the strength of the blur before the focal point. To enable near blur you need to toggle on Sprite DoF Near enable. This allows you to get the character in front of you out of focus and the background still in focus.
• Fix LoD changes the level of detail in objects further away. It enhances certain shadows and improves meshes to be of a higher quality.

Next is lighting.

• Spotlight adds a direct light with harsh shadows and a smaller surface area being affected. You can move this around to any position you like to get the perfect lighting.
• The same goes for Sphere light, which adds a softer light with a larger surface area being affected, which gives more spread of light on the subject.
• Colour, when you click the white box you can change the colour of your light to any colour you so desire.
• Intensity changes how bright the light is.
• You don’t really need to worry about inner angle and outer angle, they just define how much spread the light has and whether or not its defined.
• Shadows should be left on so the lights cast shadows.
• Draw markers should be disabled when taking photos or filming, but they show where your lights are positioned.
• Place at camera moves the position of your light to the position of the camera.
• Remove light removes the light.
• Last few things. Resolution scale increases the virtual resolution providing a sharper image.
• And disable AI, something you’re almost definitely going to need, stops the AI from shooting at you and your teammates, but they’ll still be able to move around.

So there it is everyone, we really hope this tutorial helps you become a pro at video game cinematography. Also, go check out Cinematic Capture’s YouTube and social media. He takes amazing in game shots and cinematics. Until next time everyone. Enjoy your filmmaking!