Master Chris

I really shouldn't watch videos like this, now I'm going to dig myself further into debt when the next steam sale rolls around. Some of these I've never heard of but they do look absolutely fantastic, I am kind of surprised that GTA V for PC wasn't even on the runner up list though, or Alien: Isolation for that matter. Then again I know you said at the end of the video that you probably have a reason for a game I really like not making your list. We Happy Few looks really interesting, kind of has a Mirrors Edge vibe to the gameplay. If they nail that fear factor when you are being forced to run and hide then it will be amazing. It was exactly that exhilaration that made me absolutely love Alien: Isolation. The only game on the list I can actually recommend from personal experience would be The Crew, although a lot of the criticism is rightly deserved (and more so in some areas) I still found it to be pretty enjoyable and unique. I really love the feeling of setting off on a roadtrip in my favourite car with some friends and just enjoying the journey. You can spend literally hours just driving around looking at the scenery and always find something new, there are tons of landmarks to visit and a few of them (Cape Canaveral in particular) are very special. One thing about the game I feel is quite divisive though is the handling, lots of people really hate it but personally I kind of like it. I really like heavy, weighty handling, really throwing the car into a turn. Then again I've not driven that many of the cars in the game, once I got the Dodge Charger I pretty much drove that exclusively.

A first person 3D open world driving game, 3 years before GTA‽ I'm actually astonished, that's amazing for the time. This is why I love watching the Game Dungeon. I imagine though back in the day it must of been pretty demanding to run for most people's computers, was this like a Crysis level game? Where you needed a supercomputer to get it to run at maximum fidelity?

I'm not sure if you guys would necessarily call this Machinima but I thought I would post it up since it was made in a game. It's been a long time since I did some video editing and I decided to make a video of me and my friends playing a custom game in ARMA 2 IOGANk2U48s

I've been working on a metallic paint effect using the $phongtint .vmt command I'm currently trying it in a range of different colours.

It all sounds like good progress but I am just slightly dubious about the motion capture part, while i'm sure it will allow you to get much more animation done for Civil Protection and hopefully in turn speed up the whole production time I do worry that the animation style could clash heavily with the existing animations. Another thing is that machinima films such as Clear Skies 3 which use motion capture for character animation sometimes lack detail or have bad acting and they can end up looking rather generic and uncoordinated like the character is drunk, there's just something about the style that doesn't quite work. Ian Chrisholm also forgot to animate the hands of the characters in a lot of scenes in Clear Skies 3 so they are all either fully open or clenched into a fist, rarely pointing or gesturing properly.

Probably the first 'Machinima' I ever saw was by the Sir Community in Battlefield 2. It's not really a proper machinima film because it doesn't have any sort of story to it, it's just a stunts montage but it was the first time I had ever seen a film made in a game engine that didn't use the default player camera. The Sir Community made a few other films as well, probably the best one is their Top Gear parody video:

Yeah I know what you mean, the problem is that real time renderers are very bad at making clean models look good which is why most textures and models in games are generally given either a lot of small details or a 'grungy' look with dirt and scratches to make the scene look busy and more interesting. It's not necessarily a bad thing, in fact games like Portal 2 use it to their advantage and I think the art direction there is superb. It is problematic though when you just want a nice, simple, clean look on your model because the source engine is especially bad at doing that because it doesn't use proper realtime reflections on models, instead it uses pre-rendered cubemaps set into the map at particular locations. If anyone has seen or heard of a proper realtime reflection shader modification for the source engine I would love to hear about it, I don't care how buggy or inefficient it is I would just love to know.

You can go much higher than 20,000 triangles, especially if you are using bodygroups to compile multiple reference .smds together. You probably would struggle to go over 60,000 but it is possible, there are a lot of models in Portal 2 that have even higher polycounts. My 1969 Dodge Charger model has a polycount of nearly 40,000 and I have no trouble compiling that. I also recently made new wheels for it using a highpoly version of the tire to make a normal map. If you want the model it's a part of my vehicle pack for Garry's mod, i'm also planning to make a replacement for the Jeep and Junker vehicle in the Half Life series. http://www.facepunch.com/threads/918163-Master-Chris-s-Vehicle-Pack

It's great to see the series continuing and number 3 is by far the best of them all, very high production values and it was very entertaining.

Thanks, the Dodge Charger model is one i've been working on for years now, sort of an on-off project that i've only recently put into the Source engine. The drivetrain and rear axle was by far the hardest part to animate, in fact to get it working properly as a vehicle I had to create a new animation method. The .qc and .smd model format has been criticised for it's lack of streamlining but it is amazingly versatile and it's that freedom which allowed me to add that detail to the model. Hello Ross it's great to hear from you, it was actually this video which I sent you before: That was filmed on my older computer and back then the rendering time was so long and the hard drive space taken by the extra frames was so large that I couldn't use the method in the final film: I simply didn't have the resources to deal with it at the time. As for this video I agree that the artifacts are pretty difficult to see and I probably am lettig my perfectionist streak get in the way of progress but if you watch in High Definition you can see that the ground isn't being blurred properly in the bottom right corner of the screen from 0:25 to 0:27 and the whole road from 0:28 to 0:33. In these areas the only blurring being provided is from the frame ghosting created by the TemporalSoften part of the script. I'm probably being far too critical but I will try rendering at 360fps for my next test video to see if that does help with removing these small artifacts. Another thing I've thought of would be to actually render for a final framerate of 24fps which is used by most film cameras, this is also the framerate which the official Valve promotional films are rendered at and i think it does give the footage a genuinely filmic appearance. For the next test I'm probably going to focus on particle effects such as sparks and tire smoke and ways to co-ordinate them with the action. I've seen there are ways to trigger effects such as sounds and particle effects directly from model animations and i'm going to see if it's possible to get the effects to be triggered automatically when the vehicle is in a certain state. For example to throw sparks from the underside of the vehicle when it lands heavily from a jump. I will also continue to experiment with pre-animated camera paths. For me the demo smoother is just so buggy and user unfriendly, plus it doesn't allow for camera paths to be 'parented' to a moving object like in this test video. I'm planning to perform most, if not all the camera work in Softimage XSI from now on and then export the camera paths as animation into the source engine so I can use either Garry's Mod camera entities or the hammer equivalent if i'm filming in Half life 2. Doing this just allows for so much more control and ease of use over the demo smoother and I urge you to try it for yourself. I just find that modifying the animation path is far easier in proper animation software than trying to do it entirely in the engine especially since you can properly edit the function curves and so you have a lot more control over the acceleration of the movement, not just the key points. I learned the technique from watching work by another Machinima film maker called MaxOfS2D, you may have heard of him. In his example he uses 3D Studio Max but the method in Softimage XSI is exactly the same, although you may want to export the camera path as a separate model rather than as an attachment on an actor, it really depends on the requirements of the scene. Anyway here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muK6r58MYGI I'd recommend watching some of his finished work as it's very impressive. Max has also started his own set of machinima guides, to be honest they probably have very little to teach you but he has discovered an interesting way to simulate full self shadowing on models and he also covers ways to modify the appearance and accuracy of env_projected_texture shadows: http://blog.maxofs2d.net/?page_id=419 I don't think these methods will work in the standard Episode 2 engine because the lighting bugs haven't been properly fixed yet but the Garry's Mod version of the engine does have support for multiple dynamic light sources. Now that I think of it you mentioned in a blog post that you actually had to get help from a coder to fix the lighting in the episode 2 engine so you could complete 'The Tunnel', is this modifed version of the engine available to download anywhere? Personally I can't wait for Valve to release their Source Filmmaker tools as it will help streamline the entire process of machinima in the source engine, I think that their recent replay update to Team Fortress 2 is definitely a step in the right direction and perhaps it shows that they are taking more of an interest in machinima made on their engine. What are your thoughts?

No sorry, no mustangs yet. But yeah if you want to use the vehicles for yourself then I'd love to see what you can do, just don't decompile them without my permission. In fact if you need any modifications then just ask me to do it, I can't guarantee when exactly I'll be able to do it but I'll try to get it to you as soon as I can.

I've been getting back to work on machinima in the source engine and I decided to test a few new effects I've learned. All of what you see here is very much a work in progress, the animations, motion blur processing, models and sounds. I'm hoping to improve and polish all these elements. I'm very interested in hearing you're suggestions or ideas for improvements in all aspects of this video. (Also does embedding work on this forum? None of the codes I know work for embedding youtube videos here.) Motion Blur Processing: This was accomplished using the same process that Ross Scott uses in his Civil Protection and Freeman's Mind series. Basically this method involves filming the footage at 180 frames per second in the source engine and then running it through the MVTools plugin using this script: LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files (x86)\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\mvtools.dll") source = avisource("sidepass1 180fps.avi").assumeFPS(180).ConvertToYV12() backward_vectors = source.MVAnalyse(isb = true, truemotion=true) forward_vectors = source.MVAnalyse(isb = false, truemotion=true) return source.MVFlowBlur(backward_vectors, forward_vectors, blur=100).TemporalSoften(2,255,255,255,2).selectevery(6,1) This uses the high frame rate video to work out motion vectors for areas of the image and then blurs them based on their speed. Unfortunately in some of the high speed shots in this video you can see that there is no blurring, I think this is because there is too much movement in that part of the screen and the tool is unable to keep track of the movement because it's sample size is too small and so the movement goes out of it's range. I'm guessing that capturing the video at an even higher framerate might fix these issues but i'm wondering if there is another way around the problem. To be honest I know very little about AVISynth scripting and using the MVTools plugin and I am appealing to anyone with previous experience to offer advice to help me improve the effects shown here. I should also mention that this was made using MVTools version 1, I know there is a newer version available but i was unable to get my script to work when using it. Animated Camera: The animated camera path was created in Softimage and put into the Dodge Charger model as a simple animated attachment point. I then parented a normal garry's mod camera entity to the attachment point and the animation plays out thereby moving the camera with it. This is mainly just an experiment but it will be useful for my future films which involve high speed chase sequences. Dodge Charger: If you want the model you can download it here: or as part of my vehicle pack SVN of Garry's Mod: http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/mastersmiscmodels More information here: http://www.facepunch.com/threads/918163-Master-Chris-s-Vehicle-Pack The sounds you hear in this video are still WIP but the final versions will replace the current sound effects in the next update to my pack.

Yeah I think this would be the best idea. That said I would really like it if the latest donator's names could be put into the credits of the most recently released video you make but I understand that could be potentially difficult depending on how popular this donation thing becomes, I mean if you got a hundred donations between two videos you would end up having to make the credits several minutes long to show all the names. The idea for custom titles/tags would also work pretty well. Maybe if you got enough you could make a special donator 'Thank you' video which covers the names of the donators in some way. Perhaps as a Civil Protection special, lets say Mike and Dave are having to clean a war monument as a punishment for poor performance and the names on the plaque could be those of the donators. Maybe you could carry this idea more subtley into a normal episode as a set of Easter eggs. You could have roads named after donators or even give the names to minor characters. I don't want to pressurise you though and ultimately we're donating to you because you give us excellent entertainment so it would be pretty counterproductive if these additions actually ended up stifling your creativity and reducing the quality of your work by diluting it with countless shout-outs. Really then the best reward you can give us is to keep doing what you're doing and keep doing it well.