Final Assignment

CS 5964 – Machinima

This semester’s class was a fun and exciting class. There are definitely a lot of things that I know now that would have helped to know at the beginning of the semester. I’ll try to break some things I learned the hard way into groups below.

General – There are some general things that working this semester has taught me. The biggest thing is that there are a 1000 ways to do something, but there are definitely some better ways than others to accomplish the same task. It can be nearly impossible to find good ways to do things on your own or even by reading the documentation. I found the docs to be far less useful than spending a few minutes in the lab with a TA or your team members. More so than any other group project I’ve worked on, time is far more effectively spent working together in the same location. Asking someone else how to do something is far less time consuming than looking it up on your own.

Faceposer – This is the most powerful thing for creation of choreography. The first couple of assignments I tried to time certain elements of the scene and do it all in hammer. Faceposer is a lot more powerful than just phonemes and gestures. Use it to everything you can: phenomes, gestures, flex-animations, camera triggers, audio adjustments, etc. It is much easier to make a change in the time line of face poser than timing stuff in hammer. You’ll prolly figure that out pretty quick, but I wish I would have known that before my 2^nd homework.

Hammer – Hammer is a finicky beast. Keyboard shortcuts will save you all sorts of time! Learn ‘em and use ‘em. You’ll lose count of how many times you type alt-enter to bring up properties or ctrl-E to center the selected object after the first day of using hammer. F-9 runs your map for testing. When the dialogue box comes up, click no on the middle and bottom options to make things run very smoothly. Add the –windowed and the –dev command line options to the box to save your computer’s resources a little bit. The –dev command will skip the annoying, time consuming splash screen of the guy with the faucet coming out of his neck. That 10 seconds it saves every time you run your map will turn into days by the end of the semester!

Post-Processing – Anything you can manipulate in post-processing is easier that to try to do the same thing in Hammer. Audio voiceovers can be more easily timed in post. One thing you can’t do in post is add more footage that what you already have though. Make sure that you don’t cut things too tightly in your hammer/faceposer scenes or you’ll run into problems in post and may need to go back and re-film a lot of things. Sounds obvious, but if you’re warned about it, it will be a mistake that you don’t need to make to find out how much time can be sucked away.

Filming in Hammer – James, our TA, sent out an awesome email that I referred to many times while filming my video. He gave a step by step process of how to film your scenes. I’ll list it below:

1)   Close all programs and load HL2 manually, opening the map file through the console ( I.E. "~" for console, "map web102clean")
2)   in the console set the frames per second to 30 ("host_framerate 30")
3)   start your movie, giving it a name with an underscore for an easier time later on. ("startmove HW1_")
4)   issue the reload command to reset the map to beginning and start the movie ("reload")
5)   wait for the map to run.  Note: it might stutter a bit as it goes.  This is normal.
6)   issue the endmovie command once your done ("~" for console, "endmovie")
7)   Close HL2 and open Virtual Dub.
8)   In Virtual Dub, go File->Open Video File
9)   Navigate to the hl2 folder (steam, steam_apps, "name of account", half life 2, hl2)
10) Select the first tga file from the series.  ( I.E. HW1_0000.tga)
11) Then select Audio->Source Audio and select the audio file (HW1_.wav)
12) Then Video->Compression and select a codec (Windows Media 9 and Xvid work well)
13) IMPORTANT!!!!   Go Video->Framerate and select "Change so audio and video length match"  This will keep the frame rate correct.
14) File->Save as Avi and give it a name.
15) Rejoice Mightily, for you (should have) gotten a finished movie file in a manageable file size!