The303

Hard at work.

An interview with a boomer was the first animation Id made in quite a long time as I was very busy for most of 2011. This animation used a L4D2 boomer model with added facial morph flexes and eyeposing.  Creating morph flexes can be a tedious process and setting up eyes is also a big pain in the ass as lots of things can easily go wrong.  Despite all this, creating eye&face flexes are now one of my favorite things to use now because it opens up so many possibilities.  In L4D2, there are no flexes for the special infected models so I had to create a set on my own. I first prepared the model for eye posing by assigning the eye area polygons to a separate texture ID for the eye texture.  Then, I created a basic set of 16 morph targets (Standard source engine flex sets for models is around 35) in 3DSmax from the original model. The set I made can be viewed here.

I mainly used soft selection with verticies to change the facial expressions.  I found out that there is a lot of tweaking on part of the soft selection you need to do in order to make the movement look alright (as moving verticies in groups without soft selection looks bad and looks like the skin stretches).  Here is a demonstration of the “soft select” effect on moving one vertex:

I also learned that you can have meshes that are both editable poly and editable mesh in your flexes as long as the topology is unchanged.  One mistake I made was forgetting to select “ignore backface” on my selections so a part of the back of the boomers neck stretched out in one of the targets.  I still used that target since the animation has the boomer facing the camera, but if this was an actual model release and not just for a movie clip I would have had to redo it.  Some of the flexes are off and sometimes the teeth distort, but for the most part it looked alright for this video.  The process of creating your own morph flexes in source is documented here:
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Creating_Flex_VTA_files_with_3D_Studio_Max
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Eye_Position_Setup
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Character_Facial_Animation_Shapekey_Set
(one thing of note is that these guides assume you make the standard shapekey set and use the human SDK compile scripts; as for a reduced or custom set you are going to have to play around with your QC compile script quite a bit and know what you are doing.  For this model I went with this guide here which uses a reduced set and for a single flex you something that looks like this per-flex:
)

The process of setting up source “QC eyes” was quite a pain and its hard to explain it without going into too much technical detail as I had lots failed attempts, but this video has a nice overview of the process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHn19qy0Q0E

Also at some point I might make my own tutorial with troubleshooting methods included.  Also, here is the custom eye textures I made for the eye:


The animation was hastily created by animating just the bones since I didn’t have a rig. I probably could have done much better, but at the time I just wanted the thing ready quickly (I had spent much time on troubleshooting and was getting impatient).  The next step was compiling the model and the use of faceposer to test out the morph flexes:


One of the other things I did with this video was using this simply AWESOME program called SrcDemo2.  This program allows for motion blur to be created from source games with ease.
http://code.google.com/p/srcdemo2/

The video was rendered in GMOD just like “The Insult”, and I added the “film grain” effect in Sony Vegas. Lastly, the clip audio is from the movie “Slither”

You’re leaving already?  Don’t forget to pack me! 

This is what happens when you leave the door unlocked.  The trio of trouble have taken over.

THE INSULT was the first real machinima I had made in Source engine, and I’m kinda surprised that I hadn’t made any sooner despite all the mods and tests I had done before.  Although It didn’t quite work as well as GORDON’S BREAKFAST, I had learned a lot of things.  The first thing I had done was make my own model rigs for animating using superaldos BIPED rigging tutorials as a guide (This is what I used at the time, but now I recommend using thejazzmans Character Animation Toolkit rig creation videos).  Upon creation of the BIPED killing floor model I made a quick test animation to check how the rigging worked:

The rigs were not perfect and they were kinda rushed, but they got the job done.  This was the first time I had ever used animation rigs, so this animation went way smoother than anything I had attempted before.  The other big thing was using my custom animations with Faceposer on the killing floor model.  Faceposer was a bit difficult for me to get used to, but fortunately there is many many video tutorials out there, so there is no shortage of troubleshooting material.  The third thing I did with this video was the creation of several particle-based effects and the use of particles spawned on models.  I had created two special “spritecard” VTFs for this animation which looked like this:

I cover the creation of spritecard VTFs in this two part video series: Part1 Part2
I made several test shots of this system and others to test the model particle code here:

Some WIP video footage of various tests:

Here is the QC script of my pyro model:

Also more info on QC commands with particles here.

The whole thing was done in GMOD with an NPC_keliner for the Killing floor model and a prop_dynamic for the pyro (since it was easier to do a direct animation input without the use of faceposer, as pyro has no facial flexes).  The depth of field animation was done with a env_zoom entity with keybinds set to give it inputs when to zoom in and out.  The zooming was combined with the process of demosmoothing for camera movements (If you are going to do this be prepared to get wierd errors… demofiles are very buggy in gmod).  As of now, I have learned some different and less painful ways of doing the same things as you can now find various GMOD lua tools to make the process easier. An excellent resource for Source/Gmod movie creation can be found here: SEMMD

Lastly, the music I used was from the Journeyman Project 2: Buried In Time OST.  I also must mention that the Journeyman project series were some of my favorite games of my childhood.  In 1995 I actually got to tour Presto Studios right after Journeyman Project 2 had shipped.  Fun times.

Brothers