On the heels of creating LET ME IN BARNEY, I switched over to 3Dsmax and got to work on figuring out how to animate in that. At this point in time the last time I had used max was ten years ago taking a summer animation course. It had been so long I had totally forgotten how to do anything so I had to pretty much learn from scratch with the exception of how to create autokeys and manipulating keyframes. Things went much smoother as the rotation gizmos were a breeze to work with. I was still animating per-bone, so there was no control rigs or IK chains. I made a series of test animations by flailing the arms around which became the series of “HURRDANCE.smd” animations. The result I found hilarious and even though they were test animations just for learning max, I worked them into a video called “GORDON IS LATE”:
I had replaced all the “idle” animations of the characters with my custom ones and recorded the footage in 1080p in fraps. I then made the project for 720p, so I could “pan” across the footage so it looked like the camera was actually moving when in fact it was stationary. I used Adobe Premere for editing and I did have to do some post-effects and some subtle compositing. An example of this is the “music start” on the console screen since I didn’t know how to do a texture toggle in GoldSrc yet.
A thing that was pointed out by many youtube commenters is the white hands on scientist model “Luther”. This was due to a model compile script error as a result of decompiling the scientist model. In HL1, all four scientists are in the same model file and only the head meshes and the hand texture are swapped to change the characters. This way, the model is more efficent since its sharing the same body mesh. When the model was decompiled, the lines of QC compile code that defined the texture swap ($texturegroup skinfamilies) had been omitted so only one hand texture was displayed. After this, I used a different decompiler which preserved the “$texturegroup skinfamilies” lines shown here:
A second error from decompiling popped up in the form of Walters glasses being completely opaque as seen here:
I fixed this by setting the texture for the glasses to “Additive” and saving the model. In GoldSrc engine the textures are stored inside the model so you have to made any changes directly in Half-Life Model viewer; where as in Source engine, the textures are stored externally in a materials path and are edited there.
The quote “OH SHIT” at the end of the video was taken directly from the angry barney speech from the SSH:WTF mod (which I was later told was taken from the Freemans Mind Machinima series). In this video I had done a basic model head hack to create the gordon scientist model using Milkshape3d since I still had not figured out how to re-skin in 3Dsmax. When I was thinking of making more videos, I originally had the idea of doing face texture swaps for the expression changes on Gordon since the model had only a flat surface. I later realized that this would conflict with the rest of the models and I eventually found the “High Definition” model for Gordon to use in the next GoldSrc video.
