Stills, sound and demo recording

Since my last post I must say I’ve been rather productive. I’ve produced some preliminary stills for the digital storyboard (posing rag dolls in Gmod), roughed out almost the entire soundtrack (Using Sound Studio) along with playing with some of the SFX from inside TF2 and had a look at recording demo’s in game.

The stills I’ve produced are to aid in the storyboarding process I will undergo tonight. I’m visiting my friend, whose artistic talents I will be putting to good use in producing a drawn storyboard. This is being done to hash out how much of the action will take place and to get a little outside feedback on how this is all going. Though I’m sure the final product will likely differ a fair bit from this storyboard (limitations in virtual acting/camera work) but I’m hoping to expand on my ideas and even add in some new ones.

To sound tracking and SFX, two big steps forward. I’ve essentially finalised the soundtrack after scouring through my vinyl and digital tracks, and after putting them all together I’m getting a really strong feel for the story, the ups and downs etc. It has all come together really well and will greatly supplement the storyboarding process. Though the soundtrack is of quite acceptable quality and all the edits are smooth I still feel I will redo the entire soundtrack from scratch, just to tighten the audio to the video. At present the piece is at 8 minutes length, and I’d imagine it will run a little less than that, as I’m looking at cutting out a chorus or two as I’m a little concerned about a few moments losing momentum due to being stretched out due to the music. Also a big development is now having access to the entire sound effects bank for Team Fortress 2, to access this information I had to jump into the team fortress 2 content.gcf file in my C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\ directory. However, accessing a .gcf file is not so easy as accessing a folder in your OS. In order to get to the good stuff you must extract the relevant files as .gcf is a compressed format utilised by steam for game content. There are a few applications which can do this for you, most notably GCFScape, which is all fine and good provided you have the .net framework, I however did not and had trouble accessing the Microsoft downloads page in order to get it and thus opted for GCFExplorer developed by SASiO. With the team fortress 2 content.gcf opened the SFX for all the weapon, characters and various other SFX can be found in GCF:\tf\sound (playing around in the .gcf however brief brought me back to the .pak days of Quake, good times). I must say, Valve have done an amazing job, providing a plethora of amazing effects and entertaining taunts/shouts/cheers for each of the classes in TF2. I took a bunch of these to populate a section of the soundtrack with what is happening in the story just to test the work flow and how Sound Studio ran manipulating these .wav files and it worked a treat.

Lastly, to demo recording. I dived into the demo recording and viewing options in TF2 in preparation for testing the procedure to get it to actual video. Using the following commands in the console (which you must activate in the advanced options and then access using the tilde “~” key) record “<desired filename>” and “stop”, to begin recording and stop recording at will. My advice is name your files wisely from the get go, as you should with anything and everything you save. Note that you can record in any resolution/texture detail, basically any video settings and change them later on, which could be a godsend to those with lower end hardware. I however found no slowdown while recording and in fact forgot about it until 20 minutes later, also of note is that all microphone audio will be recorded except your own. Once you have recorded your content you can access your files from a little in game UI using the command “demoui” or “demoui2″ the first of which is shown below. Its a very simple way to watch/fast forward/rewind and even jump inside your demo’s and view them in no-clip mode from out of body by hitting the Drive button, if you plan to output this for movie making the following console commands may be of use (note that all commands require that “sv_cheats <0 or 1>” be set to 1) “cl_drawhud <0 or 1>” to hide or show the hud, “crosshair <0 or 1>” hide or show crosshair and “r_drawviewmodel <0 or 1>” to hide or show your gun. More demo console commands after the jump.

Thanks for reading, T.