A Soldier’s Revenge from Tim Eyles on Vimeo.

Well, its finally done. Or at least as done as its going to get for a while.

Let me know what you think.

troubleshotproduction@gmail.com

I figured a reasonable follow up to the previous post (before I go into more demo recording info) would be to post a little info regarding virtual acting, I asked SigmaSin whom will probably have the most screen time in ‘A Soldiers Revenge, and whom I’ve to both have a bit of a knack for being a reliable, consistent virtual actor. I asked for some tips for the blog, and here they are:

Alright, here goes.

The most important elements being a virtual actor are that you must be polite and patient. If you can do that, you’re already a good candidate to act. I’ll go into more detail on this, and give some extraneous tips learned from working with SaDOS on his latest piece.

1. Do as your director tells you

It’s the vision of the director you’re trying to create here. No matter how nitpicky he gets, oblige, it all goes to creating a quality piece of work.

2. Ask questions only when the director is done speaking

Chances are, the question you are asking will be answered by the director’s description of the scene. If it isn’t, by allowing him to finish talking, you keep a more coherent picture of the scene, and it’s no problem to go and sort out a particular detail afterwards.

3. Ask questions

By doing so, you improve your understanding of the scene you’re trying to create, and possibly increase the quality over what the director had in mind. “Hey, what if we moved the soldier to the medic’s right hand side, so the rocket launcher and healing beam don’t take too much prominence?”

4. Be quiet

Posing, voice taunts, running around, shooting, talking… all of these are bad ideas while the film is rolling. Even if you aren’t anywhere near the set (not in the shot), these noises can ruin the recording and require a reshoot. Also, doing this while scenes are being explained should be avoided. Bullet holes or blast marks on set are a pain, and require spamming shots in other parts of the map to get rid of them. This is annoying, takes up time, and may ruin another set to be used. Also, the noise can get distracting when trying to explain a scene. Just be mature, sit, and listen.

5. Run through your parts

When you have a couple specific marks to hit during a scene such that you are framed properly, run your path a few times before you go for it in scene. Remember that while recording, it’s better to be off the mark a bit than to correct it, but you want to be as close as possible. So, knowing your path is a good thing. This also applies to looking – practice the look a bit, then when shooting, just try to do it in one mouse motion. Even if you miss, stay where you ended up looking. It will appear better than if you try to correct it.

6. Crouch to get in to place

If you need to stand in a specific spot for a scene, crouch and move to it to fine-tune where you’ll be standing.

7. Explode off set

When you’re dying or taking damage in a scene, between shoots, use the explode command 1-2 times off set. This cleans up the blood and removes corpses. Shooting off set removes bullet holes and blast marks, but takes a lot longer.

8. Use the third person view

When a TF2 server has sv_cheats set to 1, you can type “thirdperson” in to console to get a view of your character from behind. This lets you control your actions a lot better, since you see what is seen on camera: you can tell when you’re clipping, you can tell when you’re not moving smoothly, etc. I would always recommend this unless the scene requires you to do something you need particular skill in game to do (hit a moving target, rocket jump). I would not recommend using the thirdperson variants unless you need them specifically (thirdperson_mayamode, thirdperson_platformer). The view is most intuitive with the basic settings, if you change it, you may find it difficult to move, and difficult to get back to a normal third person view.

9. Adjust your sensitivity

Usually, smooth movements are required, unlike in game, where you want to be as quick as possible. Consider turning on the mouse filter, or lowering your sensitivity (particularly if you have a scene where you have to look somewhere slowly). If you’re required to do things quickly, use the sensitivity you’re most accustomed to from the game.

10. Mess around in the skybox

It helps a lot if you’re getting frustrated or bored to blow off some steam. Build gigantic sentries, get screenshots of capture-point-sized giblets, what have you. After a few hours of shooting, slow motion no clip air melee battles for 15 minutes can really hit the spot. Also, something you do may give your director an idea for a shot.

For directors: much of this applies to you as well. Be clear with your directions, allow questions, and be patient with your actors if they’re not portraying things perfectly. Let them blow off some steam if they ask for that, or even suggest it after a few hours. Don’t goof off too much, though, as everyone there wants to get the project done; messing around with noclip gets boring after a while. Give your actors feedback between takes to let them improve their actions. Take multiple angles and shots of the same scene – it’s easier that way than to have to go back to reshoot. If dealing with ragdoll physics, the demo randomizes this, but record until you get the desired effect (in case you’re working in a situation you wouldn’t get it), then work through the demo to get the bit back. It helps a lot to have the rcon commands you wish to use bound to a key, and to keep notes on the bits you want to record. SaDOS can probably tell you more about that, though.

SigmaSin

Thanks again Sigma.

Editing is going quite well, I’ve completed most of the piece, but have a few technically complex parts that require some post processing in Photoshop and Final Cut, but hopefully I will have the edits and sound design completed in a weeks time. Very exciting.

Ive also started getting a little more active on twitter, add me @ http://twitter.com/timeyles

Cheers, T.

It’s rather late and I cant get to sleep, planning for tomorrows shoot and new production ideas seems to have my mind running a little too fast. I’ve been thinking for a while now about producing a graphic for my production ‘group’ and an accompanying animation to put at the start of my Machinima and other productions. As this piece is approaching its end and is looking to be up to scratch (but far from perfect), now would be a good time to start fiddling with such a thing. I’ve had some ideas about the logo being an old reel to reel camera made up of various tools (a mix of film making and work shed items) that together resemble a camera somewhat. I’m thinking of incorporating this logo with the stencil art or stencil graffiti aesthetic, I have a great idea on how to merge the two in the animation, where the logo is sprayed on a wall. Hopefully I can get a simple realisation of this idea done around when I’m ready to put ‘A Soldiers Revenge’ on Youtube. The focus should be to keep it simple though, I’ve already got enough on my plate at the moment.

I’m going to head down to Brunswick street (a location in my home town of Melbourne) to photograph some of the street art in the morning. Mainly focussing on the stencil art of which there is a great deal. Hopefully this gives me some more ideas.

Once I have the logo down I can develop some graphics to improve the look of this blog, I might even splash out and upgrade my wordpress account to improve the URL and add some features to the site.

Ciao for now.  T

Just a warning (that I should have guessed before it happened), the current patch and I’m assuming all patches henceforth will corrupt your demos. Meaning you cannot load them in the updated client.

This realisation came to me last night when I went to export the previous weekends recordings, I lost about 90minutes of shooting time. Kinda painful, but it could have been much worse. So be sure to put steam in offline mode and export all demos before you upgrade.

This however, has given me a heap of motivation for diving back in this weekend, and touch wood I might get principal photography done. Hallelujiah

Fingers are crossed.

Cheers, T.

I’ve decided to dedicate some posts to the processing of Demo files for Machinima, there is a bit of info out there regarding this topic, but its all a bit patchy, I figure it would be good to have all the information consolidated and referenced (read linked) in the one place.

For anyone who is starting out with demo recording, editing and exporting in the Source engine, I recommend you first read the Valve Wiki on demo recording tools. Its a good starting point for learning some of the lingo and concepts.

Though the demo system may seem daunting at first, my experiences are that once you get hands on and dive in, it all becomes fairly straight forward very quickly. Though there may be some seemingly random occurrences in replaying demos, they are negligible and most problems you will notice, turn out to be not so random, but rather, consistent. Most problems, have workarounds and will become just another part of the work flow (at least they have for me).

From personal experience, the demo files are restricted to recording players and live objects (further referred to as entities) within line of sight of the client (you) recording the demo. Though it seems a bit hazy to the exact method the process uses to define what is recorded and what is not, perhaps there is some proximity variable or it may just be the inherent buggy-ness of the demo recording/editing process. It has become clear to me that this restriction of what is recorded is not so much to reduce demo file sizes, but to hinder or stop wall-hacking.

So on these conditions I base my starting tips to recording demos (with Machinima in mind). Using the console (activated in game from Options>Keyboard>Advanced, be sure to check the “Enable Developer Console” giving access to the console where the “record [filename]” command is made. As stated in an earlier post, I recommend you use naming conventions to help you manage your demo’s later in the editing process. The more organisation/management done during shooting the more productive you will be in post which is when you will already have enough on your plate besides file management and sifting through a bunch of demo files not knowing which take was the decent one.

Once recording, your demo will record from your point of view, including your hud and playermodel (these can be hidden later) along with and in game chat/audio received (note this does not include your own voice transmissions). Be sure to keep close to the action that you want to record, but DO NOT be involved in said action, you are to be a passive recorder of the events you desire. I find that if you have still shots, its best to frame them in the demos and then roll camera, but if you know you are going to need to change the camera angles in demo smoother, then you can either frame a nice shot, or just stand idly by and do a total repositioning of the camera at a later stage. From here, you should have enough information to go shoot some demos, and I recommend you do just that. The next post will follow up on what to do next.

Part two coming soon.

T

Tags used on this post:
X .dem X demo drive function X demo files X demo recording tools X demo smoother X how to record a demo X machinima X source engine X VAC X valve demo problem X wall-hacking X wall-hacks X wallhacking X wallhac

It’s been a long day, and I’m surprised I can still stand to look at an illuminated screen. The good thing however, about long days, is if they’re productive, then you’re sure to have gotten a lot done. As it turned out, posting for help on the Dead Workers forums really paid off. I ended up with a host of able, motivated and constructive actors at my command resulting in shooting most of the first 8 scenes of the short. Half of the entire piece. This is far beyond what I had planned to achieve today.

First up, special thanks to SigmaSin, DogmeatStew and Radec who helped out for 4 hours. Not to forget Choke, Clydefrog, Regory and Zimo. To all of you, thanks, especially for your thoughts/ideas, as I’m sure you noticed, I’m still finding my feet in the directors chair, so your advice and criticisms are essential.

So with these demos shot, im now turning my hand to some serious work on demo smoother. After an hour playing with it tonight leading to frustrations over missing functions, seemingly in my version. My problem is that in the demo smoother window, I’m missing the “lock camera” function, I’m not sure if I need it, but on top of this, the ability to add key frames is broken, in that when I hit the button, it will jump back on the camera track and create a key frame there, instead of the position I desire. However, I stumbled across the following poster who had the same problems as I, I just jumped back on my windows machine to test out his work around and it appears to be sound. As its too late to continue on it, ill leave it for tomorrow.

I’m keeping it brief as I’m exhausted. But as a parting note, I’ll leave you with the 4 most important things I’ve learnt today.

1. Hard work can be really enjoyable.

2. Hitting a Scout in mid double jump is hard.

3. bind <key> explode         //no. really

4. The Skybox was made for fun. Awesome, awesome, fun.

Thanks guys. T

After the two hour shoot I had a brief look over the material I had shot, I started keeping a tally in excel of the takes, noting the scene the take was for, the filename, size/length, quality and whether it had been exported. I’ve decided to expand this to keep while recording (not neccessarily in full detail, but just to keep track), I see this addition to the workflow will be beneficial further down the production line.

Demo naming conventions, as I had figured, are important. My first method was simply naming the demos take001 and incrementally up the number with each consecutive take. Im now moving to sc001take001 (using my scene breakdown to denote which scene is which) which makes reviewing and exporting your demos much easier. Im also looking into binds to automatically activate and increment the demo recording at the hit of a single key to start and stop.

For the tech details on exporting demos, the following wiki covers enough of the bases:

http://tf2wiki.net/wiki/Help:Recording_demos

When exporting, trimming your demos down as tight as possible is a wise decision as the .tga files that are exported take up a lot of space very quickly (about a gig per minute at highest quality). I found VirtualDub (suggested and detailed in the above wiki) to be fine for the task of converting the .tga images to .avi video, and making use of queuing up jobs is great to process later when you have grabbed all of the source images.

After throwing some of the .avi’s into Final Cut Pro I played around and things are looking great, the frames are smooth enough that it still looks good when slowed way way down (I think I went as low as 30%), im now delving into demo smoothing, just to get an idea if there is anything I can change in shooting the footage that might aid in later processing, but so far all it seems that is important is to be close enough to see the action (dont be so close that you interrupt the actors) and you can create entirely new camera paths before exporting. Demo Smoothing will be essential to this production, I can just tell.

Bye for now T.

bind = “sv_noclipspeed 5″

bind – “sv_noclipspeed .5″

bind F1 “sv_cheats 1;
god;
noclip;
r_drawviewmodel 0;
cl_drawhud 0;
sv_alltalk 1;
mp_disable_respawn_times 0;
mp_autoteambalance 0;
ent_fire item_healthkit_full kill;
ent_fire item_healthkit_medium kill;
ent_fire item_healthkit_small kill;
ent_fire item_ammopack_full kill;
ent_fire item_ammopack_medium kill;
ent_fire item_ammopack_small kill”

bind F2 demoui2

bind F3 stop

bind F4 record take0

bind F5 jpeg

bind F6 “noclip”

//bind F7

//bind F8

bind F9 “fov_desired 75″

bind F10 “fov_desired 80″

bind F11 “fov_desired 85″

bind F12 “fov_desired 90″

So I’ve found some time to blog on the first nights shooting. After concerns that I wouldn’t get onto the server I had originally planned to, I put out feelers for what other options that were out there. I assumed it would come to nothing just like the three other times I tried, but lo and behold [WP] cHoke told me to check out GameArena, saying he heard you could buy server time there. This however wasn’t true, you cannot buy server time, BECAUSE IT IS FREE. I made a booking selecting various options (detailed further) and received a return email as follows (specific details removed):

This email is to confirm the GameCreate booking made at
07:48pm, Saturday 12th April. This is an automatically generated email; no reply is required.

Listed below are the full details of the requested booking:

Booking description: xxxx
Booked Date and Time: Saturday, 12 April 2008 @ 09:00pm AEDT
Duration: 3 hours
Game: Team Fortress 2
Server address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxxx
Max players: 10

The following server settings were selected:

RCON password: xxxx
Join Password: xxxx
Time Limit: 2 hours
Capture limit: No limit
Custom Maps: ON
Max Rounds: Unlimited
Frag limit: Unlimited
Start Map: tc_hydro
Map Cycle: cp_badlands

Auto Team Balance: OFF
Critical Hits: Enable Criticals
Respawn Timer: Disable Respawn Timers
Stalemates: Disable Stalemates
Stalemate at Timelimit: OFF
Party Mode: OFF
All Talk: ON

If you have any problems, please visit GameArena Support at http://www.gamearena.com.au/help/contact/ . Choose ‘GameCreate’ from the drop down list and be sure to quote your booking ID.

Your booking ID is xxxxxxx

Regards,
The GameArena Team

Yes. It is indeed awesome. I have no idea how I didn’t find this service earlier, and now I don’t care. Note, all bolded entries are customisable. This proved a lifesaver as when time came to use the other pre arranged server I couldn’t get on due to it being stuck on a map I didn’t have and couldn’t get hold of via the server or FPS banana. This problem is through no fault of those providing me with the previous server, they have been as helpful as can be expected given their other commitments.

After getting on the server I fiddled with the console commands to see just what I could do. As it turned out I had access to all the tools I needed (or thought I needed at that point). I had made a config.cfg to customise some controls, with binds to the keyboard for switching to what I will from henceforth call ‘camera mode’, hiding the view model, the HUD and switching on noclip. I have further expanded this config file and will post it after this as a separate submission on the blog.

So I rallied the troops, a bunch of TF2 players on my friends list who had offered to help when I pm’ed everyone on my friends list looking for virtual actors, what they lacked in experience they made up for in enthusiasm. Considering my inexperience in directing they all did rather well. However, if there is one thing I’ve learned, is that its very hard to make a bunch of people stand very still for a very long time in a FPS. Random owning, as frustrating as it was to see my set ruined by blood, bullet holes and a dead body, it was amusing and diffused some of the stress. Filming in a virtual environment is actually quite stressful, even with noclip switched on, the ability to take instant flight at breakneck speeds doesn’t change the fact that the environment, can feel truly restrictive at some points, for example when trying to frame shots and keep the virtual actors on the server (I’m sorry guys, I know how boring it can be, but there is little I can do to change that!). I surprised myself with some of the clever tricks that can be done within the game, an example being where I needed a shot of two players standing in a doorway, with the roller door opening to reveal these characters standing at attention, I wanted them to be motionless, and so I employed a third actor, in the class of a spy to open the roller door while cloaked, giving the illusion that the door opened automatically. The next problem however, was the fact that the medkits and ammopacks were visible (a problem now solved with a simple batch of commands provided in the config), and very distracting. So, next we redid the shot with the spy lower on ammo and health, picking up the packs and cloaking, then speedily running to the door, the actors doing their poses and then charging off. This all had to be timed so that both the pickups didn’t respawn, and the spy’s cloak not running out of charge. This shows you how a simple shot can turn into a complicated one when you get a little picky.

“Cows don’t look like cows on camera, that’s why we painted the horse.”
“What do you do when you need a horse?”
“Ehh, we usually just tape a bunch of cats together.”

Browsing over this post, its a mess, so I’ll leave it there. Take a look at the follow up post that will give you the run down on the config, which is essentially just a bunch of binds that are at the start up of the game.

Cheers. T