CIVIL PROTECTION:

Well as some of you may have guessed, yesterday’s video was not actually a new game engine. It was the work of Michael Breazzeal, who has done other game-related animations. He contacted me last year about a Freeman’s Mind animation he made and offered to help with the videos. I thought this style of animation would be good for an idea that had some sort of time pressure on it, since this is much faster than animating in 3D. All the animation for this was done in under a week, though he was working feverishly on it during that time. Because of the time constraints, he wanted me to emphasize that this is not his best work and is capable of better quality.

This was originally meant to be a triple feature, though one of the episode ideas was scrapped to make sure everything came out on time. I have dozens of ideas for CP in my head, these were two I thought work work well with this animated style. “Reception” was just a quick joke one that I thought wouldn’t lose anything by not being rendered in 3D. “Lift” was one that due to other projects I have planned would likely have been years before I got around to it. While some of “Lift” would be possible in the Source engine, doing something like that without having the lighting being screwed up would have required a LOT of tricks and may not have been possible in Source.

This double feature was also another reminder as to why I try to avoid deadlines. While the animation work was done well ahead of schedule, the sound editing was not and a lot of it ended up being done at the last minute by a backup backup sound editor and myself. I had no less than four people bail on me during the duration of this episode and it was really down the to wire getting it in on time. Also while his name isn’t in the credits, “Chuck the 2nd” gets an honorable mention for volume balancing work that just didn’t happen in time because the pipeline was so jammed up.

Finally, working on this and not having to do ANY of the animation work was kind of intoxicating. I love writing and directing videos, but animation work is usually an exercise is misery for me. While I do appreciate the cinematic feel that 3D graphics can provide, I could see doing more animation projects, so long as I don’t have to be the one animating it. Any ideas that I feel like won’t massively benefit from being done in 3D or else require too many resources might get transferred to animation projects instead, provided people will be able to animate it. I prefer the look of 3D graphics, however, I would much rather have more of my ideas get out in a different medium than not at all.

NEW ENGINE / MOVIE PROJECT:

Progress on the movie project is going slowly, but is very encouraging. I am definitely seeing benefits of allowing myself more time to write and develop the script, I think the eventual payoff on this will be enormous. I’m taking every effort to make sure this script is extremely fine tuned and is some of the best material I can come up with, a practice I think even Hollywood doesn’t exercise most of the time.

As for the engine, I actually did research all the engines mentioned in yesterday’s post. Based on my research, I’ve decided to transition to the Unreal 3 engine for multiple reasons:

-It appears to be far less buggy since when it was launched, and I think likely has much more functionality than Source at this point.
-I’ve seen machinima from other games successfully ported over to it
-It seems to have the most overall community support, so I won’t be on my own when I have problems
-Despite trends in the industry, it doesn’t actually HAVE to have desaturated color, the whole screen in a tinted color, and excessive bloom everywhere. It is capable of very good graphics, so much so that I don’t see obvious advantages of other engines like Crytech or Unigine.

I am still learning the engine however, which will take me time. If you wish to help with the movie project, the #1 thing I want to focus on at this phase is being able to have a dozen or two rigged human models, capable of lip sync and facial expressions. I think it’s unrealistic to do this all from scratch and variations to some sort of template model would be best for this. I’ve also heard Poser or Daz Studio may be well equipped for this job. If you have experience creating or modifying faces of 3D models and wish to help on this project, please contact me.

FREEMAN’S MIND:

More Freeman’s Mind is coming, the next episode is about a quarter done. I actually was planning to have another video done for March, but I ended up moving again (I don’t want to be a nomad even though I seem to live that way), which consumed a lot of my time, also I was trying to ensure the April Fool’s Day video got done in time. Progress will resume on it very soon.

ADHD version: Ross is working on more videos.

Youtube

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Hey everyone, I have not one, but TWO new Civil Protection episodes! For those just tuning in, the last Civil Protection episode left me so frustrated with the Source engine that I said I wasn’t going to make another episode on it. Well I meant it! I looked at the Unreal 3 Engine, Crytech 3 engine, Unigine, iClone, but finally decided on the Smackdown Engine by Funkdoobiest Software. All future videos here will be made using it.

The Smackdown engine has been nothing short of incredible, as I’m sure you’ll see in the videos. I’ve been able to do work on it that may not have even been possible on the Source engine due to how it handles lighting and object manipulation. With this engine, episodes have been produced in days that would have taken me months in the past. Because of my switch to it, I’m so far ahead of schedule on my movie project that I had time to make some shorter CP episodes. Enjoy!

Hey everyone, I’ve had a bit of a setback as I lost power for a few days because my landlord decided it would be cool to not pay the power bills even though I give him cash on time every month. I’m convinced he has a mistress in Copenhagen, so maybe he needed the money in advance for that. Regardless, I have power back now and will continue working on stuff. I’ll be working on Freeman’s Mind this month and making more (but slow) progress on the movie project. I’m thinking it may be unrealistic that the movie will be finished this year, but I hope to get a lot of it done regardless.

I tend to be perpetually behind on the things I’m working on, but I thought I might add some democracy to the process. While I will be continuing to work on videos, I wanted to see if people had a clear preference for other things I can be working on. I’ve put up a poll above, let me know what you would like to see happen next (besides more videos of course).

[poll id=”5”]

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At long last, here’s the next episode of Freeman’s Mind. This episode got delayed for dozens of reasons, none of them especially interesting. It mostly has to do with me attempting too many things at once. I’ll try and get more FM episodes out as soon as I can.

People who are very familiar with Half-Life may notice this episode doesn’t play out how the game normally does. Normally, there’s a sequence you have to initiate before the game will progress, but here, it’s already happening by the time Freeman shows up to it. You can blame this on Half-Life: Source. All I did was load a saved game I had, and the events played out as you see them, every time I tried. I wasn’t able to find a workaround for this, but I don’t think it really matters in this case anyway.

Youtube

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Merry Valve-Time Christmas! This episode is obviously late for a lot of reasons, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. This episode ended up taking massively longer than it was supposed to and was meant to be an “easy” episode. It was actually supposed to be the second part of a sub-series idea I had for Civil Protection, called “Community Outreach” episodes. The idea was that I would take viewer questions pretending to be City 17 citizens, pick ones I liked, then have Mike and Dave answer them on-camera. I thought this would be a fast way to get episodes out, but too many things in the Source engine ended up slowing me down. I still think the idea has potential at some point in the future however.

This is also the first episode where the majority of the animation (maybe 90%) is done via motion capture. While both “Morning Patrol” and “The Tunnel” used a few motion capture animations, this is the first one where I acted out the major parts myself. I think the results are mixed. The raw animations are quite jittery, so I had to smooth them out substantially. This leads to some slightly awkward movements in places, but I think the technology has a lot of potential and can save a bunch of time, depending on how dynamic the animation is.

Finally, this is likely going to be the last Civil Protection episode done on the Source engine. While I have almost no problems with the general look of the engine, the behind-the-scenes work involved with creating the episodes is just too massive for what I’m trying to do. While I plan to eventually make future CP episodes with Half-Life content ported over, it’s going to be a long time, as I’m going to be focusing on trying to create an actual full-length movie this year (and more Freeman’s Mind). I still don’t know what software I’ll be using in the future, though my first priority is to be able to easily create lots of characters capable of facial expressions and lip-sync and then see what’s compatible with that.